Maybe Bluesky has "won"

https://anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/maybe-bluesky-has-won

by GavinAnderegg • 2 years ago

461 704 2 years ago

anderegg.ca

nabla92• 2 years ago

Threads has 275 million monthly active users.

Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?)

Mastodon monthly active usage has dropped below 1 million.

paulpauper• 2 years ago

Many of these alternatives are piggybacking off the parent site. Google at pone point made anyone with a Gmail account a default user for its own social network.

verdverm9• 2 years ago

It's more about the vision and momentum

Threads is not trying to be a Twitter replacement and is another brand in the Zuck conglomerate

What makes Bluesky different to me is ATProto and the possibilities for a new social media fabric, that they learned from some difficulties with ActivityPub to build something better

https://atproto.com

andrewshadura• 2 years ago

The problem with atproto is that it's not better.

MisterBastahrd2• 2 years ago

Everyone who has an Instagram account is technically a Threads user as far as I can tell.

jsheard• 2 years ago

They probably are juicing the numbers that way, but the dedicated Threads app is pretty high on the app store charts so evidently people are going out of their way to get it.

YMMV depending on your region but my Play Store "social" chart is currently showing Bluesky at #1, then TikTok, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Reddit at #7.

daedrdev• 2 years ago

Is instagram usage counted in active threads users? I doubt it

vitorgrs• 2 years ago

Nop. You need to download Threads app and create an account (using your Instagram).

Of course Instagram helps, because they keep showing Threads posts on Instagram, notifications, etc, so people download and create an account, but is not automatic.

micromacrofoot• 2 years ago

is that Threads, or is that Instagram and Threads? Kind of a cheat without calling that out

lynndotpy2• 2 years ago

I believe Threads active users are artificially conflated with Instagram and Facebook. In all my circles, I don't know anyone who uses Threads

cogman10• 2 years ago

That's my guess. By having either of those accounts you automatically got a threads account.

criley2• 2 years ago

In all my circles, I don't know a single "X" user. Not even one. Anecdotes are funny like that.

Facebook monthly active users: >3 billion

Instagram monthly active users: >2 billion

Threads monthly active users: ~275 million

If they're cheating, they're doing a poor job of it.

minimaxir4• 2 years ago

Most people in my circle have given up on Threads (even pre-Bluesky mass migration)

nabla92• 2 years ago

I have reasons to believe your belief is incorrect. Thread's app downloads, number of posts etc. match the MAU numbers.

In all my circles is unreliable argument.

moralestapia3• 2 years ago

X is at 600 million MAU, for reference.

Edit: Thanks @JumpCrisscross.

moogly2• 2 years ago

And minus bots?

JumpCrisscross• 2 years ago

600mm*

threeseed7• 2 years ago

The trend is what is important. Threads is growing at 1m new users a day.

And at least here in Australia, X is ranked #69 on the App Store. Threads #2.

Year from now, Threads could well be bigger.

frgtpsswrdlame• 2 years ago

Yeah but what made Twitter twitter wasn't really the usercount, it was the mix of established voices and complete randos mixing. If the journalists and economists and politicians go to Bluesky, it will win. I definitely don't think that's a given but it seems much more plausible now than it did a few months ago.

Gigachad• 2 years ago

Bluesky is increasingly getting that way. Every time I check it this week I'm seeing new content from recognizable people. I think at some point there will be a tipping point where Bluesky will have more content and just win outside of alt right circles.

spacebanana7• 2 years ago

Kim Kardashian is much more important to a social network than any journalist, politician or economist. Perhaps more so than all of them combined.

There are many interest verticals on Twitter like politics, sports, celebrity, influencer, porn etc.

rvz• 2 years ago

Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?)

That is a very good question. One of the Bluesky developers gave the figure at around 2.25M DAUs [0]

This chart shows that they now have 3.74M DAUs and have 9.3M MAUs [1]

Mastodon does not give their DAUs, but their MAUs are down to less than 1M users. [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953421

[1] https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

[2] https://joinmastodon.org/servers

threeseed7• 2 years ago

Threads is closer to 300m now.

According to Mosseri it is now adding 1m new users a day.

jyxent• 2 years ago

Bluesky has also added 1m new users for each of the past 2 days.

anonymousiam• 2 years ago

You forgot to list one:

X/Twitter has over 500 million monthly active users.

lavezzi2• 2 years ago

480 million of those are likely bots

Retr0id8• 2 years ago

The 15 million figure is several hours out of date, it's currently over 17m. (https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats)

9.4m active this month (and counting), according to https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

hbn2• 2 years ago

Threads artificially juicing their numbers with Instagram integration. I can't remember what it was but recently when posting to Instagram it offered me an option to enable all my posts to automatically cross-post to Threads, very possibly defaulted to "on" too.

bakugo2• 2 years ago

I literally forget Threads exists for months at a time.

Nobody I know uses it, or has even acknowledged its existence. I see people on other social media talking about their Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and directing people there, but I have never seen anyone do it for Threads. I have never seen anyone share a link to Threads, I don't even remember what its domain name is. I have never seen Threads included in those little sets of social media icon links that all brand websites have.

I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe Threads has actual users who care about it and aren't just clueless Facebook/Instagram users who were not-so-subtly encouraged to also use Threads by those apps.

pityJuke• 2 years ago

Threads is big in the same way that Facebook is big. No juice, as they say.

davidw2• 2 years ago

It's early days, I think.

So far I see good sides of both Threads and Blue Sky. Threads has a lot more users, but I see more 'subject matter expert' kinds of people on Blue Sky as well as smaller more intimate communities. But we'll see what happens if that dynamic attracts more people and it stops being quite so cozy.

astrange6• 2 years ago

Threads seems unusable unless they change the algorithm. It defaults to For You and For You is 50% Instagram-style engagement bait, 50% people you've never heard of complaining about things you've never heard of, and 0% people you're actually following.

If they fix that it could indeed be quite good, but it still feels too much like "broadcasting" vs "conversation", and I'm personally not ready to be popular like that.

Bluesky does have a little toxic positivity but it's much better, and it's possible to chat with friends on it. (When I try enabling the algorithm features they still won't stop showing me gay porn though.)

davidw2• 2 years ago

If you follow and engage with enough people, the engagement bait stuff goes away, for the most part.

deadbabe• 2 years ago

I’m tired of threads. In the beginning it was nice but now it just gives me engagement fatigue. So much shallow content provoking replies and adding nothing to your life. It actually makes me feel worse.

And now they will be adding ads. That’s it. I’m out.

hbn2• 2 years ago

Threads is unusable. I'm not sure what I expected, but of course it's just the slop-pushing, engagement-farmed, censorship-heavy auto-moderated Instagram algorithm but in a format made to look like Twitter.

The only posts I see on there that look like they're made by humans are jilted twitter refugees trying to convince each other they're having fun by sharing articles about how X is dead. Meanwhile on X nobody has thought about Threads since the day it launched.

pjc502• 2 years ago

I think Bluesky has won the "cool" factor; remains to be seen how effective that is at pulling other users across while maintaining its culture.

There's probably a good chunk of people who just drop Twitter without picking up another social media in replacement.

bsimpson3• 2 years ago

For the longest time, I didn't get the appeal of Twitter. I started using it a bit more when I was still in the habit of using social feeds, and Facebook's was getting actively bad.

I haven't used Twitter much lately since it got bought, and I haven't missed it.

A lot of the time when I did use it, it was for customer support. I feel bad for my followers who had to see my gripes about whatever behemoth sold me crap.

poniko• 2 years ago

Too early to call, the momentum must also become normal. I can see a future where threads is mainstream and bluesky attracts news/politics.

geek_at• 2 years ago

Just saw a YouTube video from legaleagle, a lawyer and in his videos he usually cites Twitter posts but the recent ones have bluesky posts which made me think bluesky has gone mainstream so I spun up a VM and hosted my PDS for me and a few friends

I like the feeling and style of the app, it's very comfortable coming from Twitter

mrweasel• 2 years ago

It came as a bit of surprise this morning when an radio interview with a politician concluded with mentioning her Bluesky account, not Twitter or Facebook.

Still I feel like Facebook/Instagram, and certainly X/Twitter has done a lot of damage, which has cause many of us to be sceptical about ever opening another social media account.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

All of the major platforms experience major outflow after elections, no? Logically, Twitter would lose more users given that they have a larger user base to start with. What’s the next major event where we can reliably measure to see which platform is actually ahead?

the_third_wave• 2 years ago

That depends on what you use as criterium to decide which platform is ahead. For me the best criterium is how much diversity of opinion - the only type of diversity which really matters - is allowed on the platform and how much real interaction (i.e. not just shit fights) between those groups occurs. Currently X comes out on top in the former category while none of them scores anything worth mentioning on the latter.

jsemrau• 2 years ago

I'd argue longform content has done more for opinion-making than microblogs in the 2024 election. And to be honest, I like that. Irrespective of the politics the podcasts with JD Vance and even Trump at Theo Von were remarkable. Seeing Trump genuinely care about Theo's drug history was a strange but impactful moment.

unclad59682• 2 years ago

It certainly made them feel more human to me. I wish Kamala would have done the same just so people could see her have a real conversation. I have no idea how that would go.

b0sk• 2 years ago

Bluesky's issue is the Discover feed is not good. After a few days of activity, the suggestions are mostly random and nowhere close to the stuff I want. Twitter was very good - it makes sense because the graph is rich.

matsemann5• 2 years ago

Lots of other feeds, though. Which I think is a cool feature. I follow a feed for theme I'm interested in, which is nicer than following people that post about lots of various things, not all which I'm interested in.

Geep5• 2 years ago

I still think Nostr will eventually be the go-to.

ibz• 2 years ago

That's how it looks like currently. Nostr is the open protocol whereas Bluesky is the more open platform.

verdverm9• 2 years ago

Bluesky is building ATProto (https://atproto.com) which is an open protocol that you can build many types of social apps on top of

jazzyjackson6• 2 years ago

isn't it exclusively inhabited by bitcoiners? and relies on never leaking your private key, with no recourse for key rotation? or am I out of date

Heliodex• 2 years ago

We had NIP-26 Delegated Event Signing, so you could set up multiple private keys with short expiration times delegated from a root key, then if one of the delegated keys was leaked you could just wait for it to expire. This ended up being considered a bad idea as clients that supported it would have to display any notes as if they were sent from the root key, and clients that didn't support it wouldn't be able to keep track of anyone using delegation.

mandibles• 2 years ago

Protocols > platforms. Nostr will win long-term because it is a protocol.

cassepipe3• 2 years ago

XMPP would like to have a word

MisterBastahrd2• 2 years ago

Yes, that's why people go to Usenet for their discussions and not Reddit.

astrange6• 2 years ago

This isn't tenable because you need to do moderation and spam filtering, which require centralization.

verdverm9• 2 years ago

Bluesky has ATProto (https://atproto.com), so both have open protocols

ta864514• 2 years ago

I'm still hoping that X wins. I'm hoping that we learn how to coexist with a diversity of viewpoints. It seems counterproductive to partition everyone up into their own little gardens, without any viable opposition to the dominant views.

williamtrask• 2 years ago

For a nice book on the tech-philosophy of this question (recently endorsed by the Dalai Lama, you might enjoy: https://www.plurality.net/

croes• 2 years ago

Not everything that is written on Twitter is a viewpoint and those things became mire and more sind Musk bought it.

tootie2• 2 years ago

It is functionally impossible to run an unmoderated message board that doesn't devolve. Holding out hope that "we" learn where "we" is everyone in the world is not going to happen in 1000 years. The only way for a forum to remain civil and useful is for careful moderation to remove troublemakers and it is equally impossible to do that without ever making a mistake.

ta864514• 2 years ago

You're presenting a false dichotomy. Of course, there will be mistakes. And of course there needs to be moderation. But I support the moderation similar to HN, it's about politeness and respect. As long as you're respectful, you can say your piece.

Also, X does provide community based fact checking too, which works best when there are representatives from all sides participating.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK3• 2 years ago

Might be a job for an LLM personal moderator? Give it a prompt, what kind of content you want to see, and what to filter out?

kccqzy5• 2 years ago

I used to think echo chambers are bad. I realized that when algorithms force me to consume content that I don't agree with, my mood becomes terrible. In order to protect myself, I no longer think echo chambers are pure bad. They are a necessary evil to ensure my own sanity.

In the real world you congregate with like-minded people. The same applies to my social media timeline. And I use Mastodon by the way, which doesn't have an algorithm driven timeline.

ta864514• 2 years ago

Yes, I feel the same way. I'm in favor of self-controlled filters that let each of us decide what we want to consume, and when. Don't think that means you need to go into the echo-chamber permanently.

PittleyDunkin• 2 years ago

That's true, but arguably x's only draw at this point is the ease of reaching and interacting beyond this bubble. Consider the draw of major public figures being openly mocked in their own comments! It's pretty rare to see any public figure open themselves to criticism.

taylodl2• 2 years ago

There's a reason waste management becomes so important when building cities and large communities.

ta864514• 2 years ago

There's also a reason we don't create zoning laws based on political belief, forcing everyone to agree with us if they want to be our neighbor.

davidczech2• 2 years ago

I don't think we should, nor do I think it's healthy. Some viewpoints are horrific and should absolutely be suppressed.

ta864514• 2 years ago

That's a very dangerous idea that has been tried in communistic countries many times. It always leads to horrendous outcomes and the authoritarian control of the public.

We should each follow our own moral compass, and oppose viewpoints that we find horrific. But trying to systematically stamp out disagreeable ideas, rather than to influence people with better ideas, is a road to hell.

pessimizer3• 2 years ago

I hope we get a nice distributed protocol, and I'm not completely negative on AT (or nostr) yet. Twitter is a critical chokepoint for independent media right now, and the guy who owns it is in the coming administration.

Shutting down twitter, rumble, and substack would be a massacre for independent media right now. Elon could make an offer that couldn't be refused on the other two, and turn on the censorship harder than Facebook.

The right-wing free speech heel turn is always the same: when you censor, you're trying to prevent the free expression of ideas, when we censor, we're trying to prevent the "support" of terrorism. Lèse-majesté is always around the corner.

ta864514• 2 years ago

I don't think the answer to the potential right-wing censorship, is left-wing censorship. Right now, X is actually closer to the ideal than any time in its history.

But yeah, if there is a truly distributed system, that had facilities and incentives which support and even promote diverse interactions, that'd be even better.

redeux2• 2 years ago

People aren't leaving X because of polite disagreement. They're leaving because ideological extremism and hate not only run wild but are actively promoted by the platform.

Here’s how I see it: imagine you like going to a restaurant for dinner fairly often. Recently, a group of rowdy patrons has started coming in, getting drunk, and making all kinds of noise. Strangely, the restaurant seems to encourage their behavior. You don’t love this—you’re just trying to enjoy a nice dinner and some casual conversation. So, you leave and don’t come back.

You can’t force the restaurant to calm down or kick out the rowdy patrons. They should be allowed to serve whomever they want. Luckily, you’re also not forced to endure their actions.

ta864514• 2 years ago

People aren't leaving X because of polite disagreement. They're leaving because ideological extremism and hate not only run wild but are actively promoted by the platform.

I disagree. I think the definition of hate and extremism has been warped to encompass things that aren't either of those things. And that's part of the problem. The rhetoric has become so hyperbolic that we're having a hard time coexisting.

The answer is for us to walk that back, and encourage actual dialogue, not run into our own safe bunkers.

You can talk to the people at your table in a restaurant, and it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.

numbers_guy3• 2 years ago

It's very hard to moderate an online forum that allows political content without succumbing to your own political bias. I don't like the trolls on X, but if X started moderating against hateful content, it would just end up censoring news and opinions like they used to do beforehand. There is just no way around that. I am not going to name examples because it would start a flame war, but there are enough recent examples.

Also, maybe I'm from a different generation, but the trolls can be very easily ignored. What do I care is some no name account is posting some stupid content somewhere on X? I already know which people I want to follow. The rest I don't care about.

threeseed7• 2 years ago

coexist with a diversity of viewpoints

Create a new account on X and then come back and talk about this.

You will notice that it is entirely right-wing political content that is being pushed.

ta864514• 2 years ago

You might be right, I don't have the data to know. But it might just feel that way, because previously it was entirely left-wing political content that was being pushed.

bagful• 2 years ago

Many people hold worldviews which are ontologically incapable of co-existence with other viewpoints. By reducing discourse to intergroup sparring and affinity signaling, the intermingling of various such extremists only solidifies the status quo.

ta864514• 2 years ago

There is a way to coexist, without it being a constant ideological battle all the time. If we can talk about the things we DO agree about, it makes it easier to talk about the things we don't. That's only possible if we're in proximity to one another.

Hiding in our own echo-chambers does not solve any real problems, and it creates new ones.

samatman2• 2 years ago

True, but those people can move to Bluesky, and a lot of them have.

Devasta2• 2 years ago

Why should a trans person have to put up with hordes of deranged cretins who believe that all trans people are inherently gross sexual predators? Why should people of color have to put up with all the nazis on that site who are gleefully awaiting when Trump will reopen the concentration camps?

Diversity of viewpoints is nonsense.

ta864514• 2 years ago

Why should Republicans have to put up with hordes of deranged leftists who believe all conservatives are inherently evil Nazi's? Why should white men have to put up with all the racists who believe they're systemically, irrevocably evil by nature, and awaiting the day that all white people can be killed or enslaved?

Diversity of viewpoints doesn't mean every viewpoint is equally valid. It means that we endure the crazies on both sides, and don't let their stupid theories prevent rational conversation and good-natured and loving people from coexisting. That is, we become more mature, and find ways to cool down the hyperbolic rhetoric -- not abandon each other.

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

Read up on the paradox of tolerance and you may see why this isn't just some "diversity of viewpoints".

- I'd love to hear more points about fiscal and foreign policy.

- I want to hear what people see in country music.

- I want to know about weird bizarre facts that can only be remembered and regurgitated by an obsessed madman. Likewise, I enjoy the occasional, IMO overanalyzed dives into arts from people who are considered auteurs that goes beyond my eye and ear

- I want to attempt to understand the experiences of those in very different socioeconomical environments. immigrants, LGBT, Some dude traveling the country on train cars,

- I want to understand more about the people who represent my country. The mundane dry stuff on the day to day, not just once every 4 years in the big showdown

- I want to hear people's technical approaches to software, hardware, and anything in between

I am open to a lot of viewpoints, I will not agree with all of them. I will find some of them obnoxious and other snooty.

Why is it that when I don't want to hear stuff like "My body your choice" I'm suddenly a coddled prude who is seeking an echo chamber? I did my time shitposting on 4chan when maybe half of it was ironic. I don't want nor need to do that anymore. That well has clearly fallen fully to Poe's law and my one and only real hard line is "don't spread hate".

This line of thought is very simple: you don't get diverse viewpoints when people are scared of being doxxed, harrased, or even murdered. You're making a place less diverse by literally trying to say they are less of a person than you. Stop it.

Animats• 2 years ago

If you have a business with a lot of customers who need a support forum, does it make sense to run a Bluesky server?

How does censorship work?

Karrot_Kream5• 2 years ago

Setting up a PDS isn't too hard but still requires a dedicated IT person right now IMO. If you have a lot of customers I think it's worth it (aka you can justify spending budget on keeping the PDS up.) If you're small, it's not worth it yet I don't think.

Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-into other labellers if you like. You can run your own labeller to get your own moderation. I run my own labeller and my own feeds so I can customize my experience but none of it is in a state that others could really fork the code. It's not too hard to start reading the jetstream (a version of the firehose that's easier to parse/read) though.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-into other labellers if you like.

Does this mean there is one set of moderation/censorship that you get by default, but you can turn it off and get a fully unfiltered version of the service? Or is it like clicking “reveal” on every hidden post individually? Are the additional “labeller” on top of the default or can you replace it entirely?

cassepipe3• 2 years ago

Doesn't it make more sense to go for Stack Overflow / Reddit model instead for a support forum ?

The best responses will bubble up and that really the main innovation that makes a forum more practical.

What about hosting a Lemmy instance or and if you have the money, Stack Overflow for Teams ?

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

n=1 but I've never seen a bluesky content link in the wild. I've seen lots of people talking about bluesky or moving to bluesky though.

Retr0id8• 2 years ago

They make it to the HN front page every so often https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bsky.app

alecco2• 2 years ago

The top links are mostly from the past week. And a lot of links are about Bluesky itself.

minimaxir4• 2 years ago

It takes a bit for content to go viral. Bluesky was mostly irrelevant until just over a week ago.

Since then I've seen plenty of Bluesky embeds in articles where there wouild have been Twitter/X embeds.

aqfamnzc• 2 years ago

Wait, did I miss something that happened just over a week ago?

Kiro• 2 years ago

Do you have any examples of articles with Bsky embeds?

MiguelX4132• 2 years ago

I see a few in some Telegram chats that I'm in

CSSer• 2 years ago

People do that when feel it's socially acceptable to do so. It feels like it could be a matter of time. A million people joined in a 24 hour period yesterday.

Starlevel004• 2 years ago

Saw one for a sports journalist on a subreddit. I think that's a clear sign of it making it, given how twitter and reddit are joined at the hip

donohoe• 2 years ago

Thats a factor of time given how new it is - and likely inevitable.

af78• 2 years ago

Another data point. When Musk bought twitter and started wrecking it, several people I followed created an account on blue sky but most did not use it that much. This seems to have changed over the past week (i.e. after the US election). Dozens of users have moved, pro-Ukraine people in particular. Some double post. As certain content creators move, others do the same, amplifying the trend. It's interesting to see network effects at play.

prisenco2• 2 years ago

Feels like the early days of the digg -> reddit migration in 2010 or so.

Network effects are so powerful at keeping people in, but they have the ability to turn a trickle into a flood when it comes to depopulating a service. The big social networks were so big we thought they were unstoppable, so I'm interested to see if we can still see a shift like that in this day and age.

lamontcg• 2 years ago

US soccer journalists seem to have migrated to bluesky en masse, and I just saw a very active thread, with a bunch of names that I recognized, cross posted to reddit.

That is definitely a quantum jump beyond a bunch of geeks posting about rust or whatever.

ZeroGravitas• 2 years ago

I saw my first local news story sourced to someone posting about something he photographed in the street to bluesky yesterday.

consumer4513• 2 years ago

This was true for my n=1 as well, until recently.

Search Reddit for "bluesky" and you will find a ton from the last month. Reddit does OCR on screenshots, so that is included.

Also, one of my highest upvoted comments on this site happens to be one. [0]

And finally, quite a few Bluesky content links have been submitted here recently [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42136408

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bsky.app

Retr0id8• 2 years ago

This is because the data in the network is all cryptographically signed based on what came before it. The protocol does this using the Merkle tree structure, which is also how Git stores data. The issue with this is: if you want to look at one piece of content in the system, you also need to know about everything that happened before.

This isn't quite accurate. You only need the MST blocks in the merkle path(s) back to the root, for the subset of records that you care about. For a single record, that's O(logn) blocks on average, where n is the total number of records in the repo. For a full checkout, the MST block count is ~33% of the number records in the repo, on average.

(MST = Merkle Search Tree, which is a special type of merkle tree, distinct from the one used by git - https://inria.hal.science/hal-02303490/document )

Also, it would be great to edit posts! I believe this is tricky because of the Merkle tree structure mentioned above

It's not so tricky at the MST level, and it already happens there when you edit your bio for example. What is tricky (relatively) is figuring out how to represent post edits at the UI/UX level.

For context, I'm working on my own PDS implementation in Python, with corresponding library for working with the MST (both fairly WIP):

https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds

https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/atmst

adastra22• 2 years ago

Sounds like they are confusing Merkle blocks with block chain.

Retr0id8• 2 years ago

An earlier version of the repo commit format (v2) had a "prev" field, which referenced the previous commit by hash. This is vaguely blockchain-ish in that you could follow the chain all the way back to the first commit*, but even then, you still didn't need the prior versions to verify the current version. In "repo v3", the prev field still exists but is optional, and in practice it isn't used.

*unless the repo had been "rebased"

kettlecorn5• 2 years ago

The competitive advantage to BlueSky, over Twitter / X, is that there's tremendous value in connecting intelligent and kind people while maintaining a certain quality standard.

Twitter / X, for political reasons, allowed extremely toxic behavior while at the same time disempowered communities from moderating themselves. If you force each individual user to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person it's a losing battle and low quality speech will overwhelm conversations. X folks know that but did it anyways.

It's also becoming more and more clear that we need a relatively neutral medium for free speech. Musk claimed to be building that on X but then did exactly the opposite. It's very hard to trust the algorithm isn't being manipulated in one way or another.

On BlueSky it's incredible how much value is already being produced by connecting intelligent and creative folks as compared to what Twitter became.

celdon25• 2 years ago

Something tells me you tend to attract harsh disagreements that may be interpreted as “toxic”. Maybe do some reflection?

kettlecorn5• 2 years ago

Not true. If someone can make a point honestly and in good faith I do my best to respect it even it's "harsh". I myself am no stranger to being very blunt when trying to make a case for something.

What I consider "toxic" is using slurs, trying to make people angry, bad faith arguments, spamming replies without giving them much thought, etc.

caekislove• 2 years ago

Get real. It's a liberal echo chamber. 90%+ of the posts there are anti-Trump and/or anti-Musk.

kettlecorn5• 2 years ago

I'm trying to avoid national politics on BlueSky simply because I want to take a breather from it.

I'm seeing vastly more signal and less noise on topics I care about like game dev, urbanism, art, and tech.

astrange6• 2 years ago

Other countries exist, but they speak other languages so you're not reading their posts. Japan /loves/ short form text social media.

nradov• 2 years ago

The X Community Notes feature is open source. That is at least a step in the right direction, even if the feed algorithm is still closed.

https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes

For better or worse, X / Twitter was never really about communities. It has always been focused on allowing individuals to broadcast their thoughts. If you want a moderated community discussion then there are much better platforms for that.

We do have neutral mediums for free speech: HTTP and SMTP.

kettlecorn5• 2 years ago

Community Notes is a great feature.

But on X too much value was / is being lost due to policy and algorithmic choices that discourage signal and encourage noise.

I used to go there for critical discussion of various tech issues or smart people talking about innovations at the cutting edge. As an example I used to use X to learn about modern graphics programming by searching certain terms to see what the smartest people in the field were saying while talking to each other.

It used to be that if a big account Tweeted something often you'd see true experts responding as the first replies. Now you'll see dozens of Bluechecks spamming memes or gross statements before you get to any substance, which inevitably has lower engagement.

Too many smart people have been turned away from the platform and it just doesn't generate the quality of discussion it used to. Already in the communities I care about I'm finding vastly more substance on BlueSky.

WaltPurvis• 2 years ago

How does moderation work on Bluesky? If it's not up to individual users to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person, who/what is doing that blocking?

Scion9066• 2 years ago

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/blueskys-moderation-architecture

You can either rely on Bluesky's standard labeler only or subscribe to ones that handle certain niches or the higher standards of moderation that you may want.

There's also lists made by other users that you can use to just block all the trolls/bots/etc on them at once (and as more are added).

kettlecorn5• 2 years ago

In addition to what the other comment said BlueSky is also so hackable that I think people will continue develop more sophisticated techniques to better moderate.

X was locked down in a way that seemed to be giving the bots and trolls a significant advantage.

alecco2• 2 years ago

If interesting people start posting interesting things on Bluesky we'll start going there. But, so far, we only see people posing and shoving it down our throats. Just like this post. We get it, you hate Musk and want to see X/twitter dead. Fine.

I'm not on Twitter and used to be on Mastodon so the idea of Bluesky per se sounds interesting. But so far it looks like a forced, desperate attempt by a very political group of people. And that's the opposite of what people like me would like to spend time on.

taco_emoji• 2 years ago

Who on earth is "shoving it down your throat"? Calm down.

unclad59682• 2 years ago

Seems calm to me. It's just a hyperbolic phrase.

gorwell2• 2 years ago

It also means they will become increasingly radicalized in their echo chamber.

It's telling that people who are leaving X are doing so not because they are being censored, but because their political opponents are no longer being censored.

matsemann5• 2 years ago

I've never seen people claim they leave Twitter because of censoring. Rather because of the toxicity and death threats you receive on what's even mundane and non-political posts. All communities have been invaded by crazy people.

epistasis2• 2 years ago

People only keep on hitting the endorphin button if it gives them endorphins. If the media channel owner dilutes the content too much by forcing too many advertisements or too much unwanted unpleasant politics down their users throats, you can't expect them to stick around.

I avoided politics, but I got tired of the bots, the spam, the idiots who paid $x getting promoted to the top of discussion with uninteresting replies rather than more informative replies.

Musk literally censored a key technical term, "cis," because it's used in culture wars in addition to all sorts of other uses in biology.

Calling this dilution of value and signal to be "uncensoring of opponents" is merely insulting reasonable people. That's not what happened at all. And the only "uncensoring" that actually happened was letting nazis and antisemites and racists be as offensive as they wanted. And that's pure uninteresting noise to all communities except the nazi, antisemite, and racist communities.

It would be good for all tech people to learn what happens when you insert too much politics into your platform: you go broke.

tzs• 2 years ago

I left because a large fraction of the things its algorithm was showing me were factually wrong. And I don't mean things that people accidentally got wrong. Or where the wrong things are there for entertainment purposes. No, I mean things where they purposefully are wrong and they want people to believe them.

I only ever followed a handful of accounts and those had stopped posting many years ago, so when Musk made it so the algorithmic feed worthless there was no reason to keep my account.

protocolture4• 2 years ago

Whoa stop shoving your posts down my throat!

numbers_guy3• 2 years ago

It's a bigger echo chamber than X. What's the point? I go online to try to get a general idea of the landscape of views and opinions.

I think a general problem with the current political landscape right now is that people literally cannot tolerate reading something they disagree with, because they convinced themselves that the other side is so morally flawed, they can just immediately write them off without further consideration.

But irrespective of that, how are you supposed to understand what is going on if you only read content by people who think the same way you do?

rconti• 2 years ago

Well, the algorithm only pushes engagement bait so it's selecting for morally flawed takes rather than nuanced takes.

numbers_guy3• 2 years ago

I don't let the algorithm dictate who I follow. I pretty much know the big names in all the areas that I want to keep up to date with. And for every big name I know their main rivals, so I can have a complete picture. It's that simple. If Bluesky manages to attract the same diversity of opinions I might start using it.

matsemann5• 2 years ago

What's the point? I go online to try to get a general idea of the landscape of views and opinions.

Not everyone uses it solely for political stuff, though. I'd like to just be in a community related to my hobby without death threats and constant abuse. We moved to bsky a year ago, been so nice.

wnevets3• 2 years ago

Threads has gone out of its way to make real time engagement impossible. Seeing post about sporting events that ended 3 days ago on your front page is terrible UX. If I was a conspiratorial type person I would believe zuck & elon colluded not to compete in that space.

threeseed7• 2 years ago

They announced today they are rolling out Lists which will be chronological.

So you would be able to build communities around specific topics.

wnevets3• 2 years ago

even that is an avoidance of a real time feed that twitter has had since the beginning and bluesky has now.

okhuman• 2 years ago

There will be no great migration like we saw in 2010 with users shifting from Digg to Reddit but, instead, only the slow trickling escapes of users to more dispersed communities.

Here the human condition can flourish in a more localized way, with more participation (less lurking). No more winner takes all.

hnthrowaway6543• 2 years ago

The real issue is that none of these alternatives (Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky) offer anything other than "we're not Twitter".

Digg to Reddit was a unique case, because Digg very specifically fucked up their site, badly, with the V4 update. Reddit was in a great spot to pick up users from Digg because of not only having a similar overarching purpose as a link aggregator, but additional features like subreddits which enabled more smaller and casual link sharing and comment sections. It was a clear upgrade from Digg V4. I do think that Reddit would have eventually overtaken Digg anyway, and V4 only sped up the process.

Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now. If you're on there to look at funny memes, cat pictures, celebrity news and pornography -- which encapsulates about 98% of Twitter use cases -- it still functions much better than the alternatives. The migrations are happening for meta reasons, either political or ToS-related (specifically, X claiming they can use images you post for AI training). This isn't a recipe for long-term success, it's a precursor for people making bunch of noise for a month and then heading back to Twitter.

As someone who doesn't really participate in these large social networks -- even modern HN is way too mainstream for me honestly -- I do think it's a good thing people get off them, though. Smaller communities are a good thing. Shouting your loudest, hottest political takes on Twitter so you can pat yourself on the back for 10k likes is a fast track to mental health issues.

astrange6• 2 years ago

Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now.

The Bluesky app both performs better and uses much less battery than Twitter does. I think because it uses Google ads now, but not sure.

Twitter also has disk space leaks - I regularly find the app has gone up to 3GB or so. (And it's not from image caching, seems to be an SQLite db of all accounts I've seen posts from.)

lthornberry• 2 years ago

The decision to promote blue check replies is a product-level decision that has made the user experience much, much worse

multjoy2• 2 years ago

Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now.

The app is a bin-fire.

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

Digg very specifically fucked up their site, badly,

And Twitter didn't? They use the "nazis at a bar" metaphor for a reason. UX is not the only way to screw up a site. Ashley Madison didn't torpedo because of a bad UI redesign.

Even on a product level, the change to not hide tweets from blocked accounts may as well have been a Digg v4 for high profile people. There was no profit to be had here and no one to gain with this update. Purely ideaologically driven.

it still functions much better than the alternatives.

in which ways? Genuinely curious. All these social media feeds, by design, all just blended into the Instagram/tiktok mush of infinite scrolling and predictive "you might like this!" sorts of algorithms to meximize engagement. None feel much easier/harder.

Symmetry• 2 years ago

It's definitely something that's happened community by community. A lot of space news I care about is still just on Twitter but urbanism stuff has mostly moved to Bluesky, for instance.

downWidOutaFite3• 2 years ago

Social networks' usefulness is proportional to the size of the network so they are naturally winner takes all markets.

volkk2• 2 years ago

unless you have two enormous networks where one happens to be libertarian/right leaning and the other is mostly very left. both have huge audiences and can likely thrive just fine on their own. i don't particularly think it's healthy, but it seems like that's just how humans are.

Tenoke• 2 years ago

It's definitely the best contender, and I've been trying to use it but so far there's less people, my feed there is much blander, there's missing features that I miss from Twitter, and everyone seems to be posting about Twitter itself all the time.

mattmcknight2• 2 years ago

That's exactly what Threads seemed like when I dipped in, so many complaints about non-Meta tech companies.

jl6• 2 years ago

The true rival to X is not using social media at all. If you’re mad at your Skinner box, switching bubbles won’t improve your life.

mepian• 2 years ago

HN is also social media…

alexjplant2• 2 years ago

Only by the loosest possible definition that would also encompass forums, IRC, game lobby chatrooms, etc. There's a clear and practical distinction between communities driven by a specific interest like this one and platforms like Xitter.

Saying that HN is social media is like saying that a taco is a sandwich.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

I like going on Mastodon and seeing other people's indie games. It isn't the same as the potato chip / crack hit vibe of other social media, but it's nice.

protocolture4• 2 years ago

Mastodon reminds me of the internet before people started doing dumb shit with social graphs.

You follow people because they will show you a cool rock, not because its a slot machine that pays out massive amounts of dopamine.

layer8• 2 years ago

Right. My opinion is that following people/accounts shouldn’t be the single approach (and that it may even be the overall more detrimental one), and that it’s generally better to follow communities. Like HN, or subreddits, web forums, formerly Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, or also more chat-like platforms like Discord and IRC.

It would be great if Bluesky could generalize to that. My understanding is that it’s focused on primarily following accounts, and that you don’t independently have communities focused around topics and interests.

cmxch• 2 years ago

Correct.

Essentially you’re switching one filter bubble for another filter bubble that makes it harder for any contrary opinion to pierce it.

downWidOutaFite3• 2 years ago

The horde of right wing blue checks that dominate all popular political tweets is not a filter bubble. It is a user-hostile feature that makes organic political interactions impossible on the platform. It turns a peer-to-peer network into top-down broadcast.

emmelaich2• 2 years ago

I follow a bunch of people on X who seem thoughtful but with whom I typically disagree with. That's useful for self-correction and avoiding group think. I also try very hard not to react negatively or dramatically.

I believe it's a mistake for the owner be so busy with his own platform but I don't follow him or any famous people. That helps too.

astrange6• 2 years ago

If you want to avoid groupthink, I recommend against following "people you disagree with" and instead following people talking about completely different things. The first group isn't really exposing you to new ideas, and the most likely reason you disagree is one of you is talking their book (ie lying) rather than some heartfelt disagreement.

rsynnott3• 2 years ago

Thing is, Twitter was, well, not good before Naughty Ol’ Mr Car showed up (there’s a reason it was affectionately known as the hellsite) but often quite enjoyable. Then it was ruined by an idiot, and Mastodon and Bluesky filled the niche. For those of us who liked old!Twitter, Bluesky isn’t a bad option.

skwee3572• 2 years ago

I find it funny how hard people try to push the “BlueSky is better than twitter” narrative. So hard, that my entire BlueSky feed is filled with Twitter refugees who shit post about twitter being bad.

Maybe instead of having yet another echo chamber of short form content, we should embrace long form, well written content with wide range of opinions.

minimaxir4• 2 years ago

Social networks have been algorithmically deprioritizing long form/well-written content, with Twitter/X being the most egregious offender.

Atleast Bluesky has a chronological feed without shenanigans.

skwee3572• 2 years ago

I don’t think the problem is the algorithmic or chronological feed.

I think the problem is that short form content simply should not exit. I don’t care what people eat for breakfast, or reading the same motivation quote over and over again.

I want to have discussions, with different opinions. And current microblogging platforms do not provide that. Hence it doesn’t matter who “wins”. IMHO they are all net negative for humanity

mrtksn2• 2 years ago

A year ago, Bluesky was an empty place, I wanted to use it but there wasn't anything. Now its bustling, there are interesting posts and they receive thousands of likes.

On the other hand Twitter still feels like where things are actually happening but more and more feels like they are about to start terminating anyone with eyeglasses.

I was there when the Digg exodus happened, it doesn't feel like that. It's something else. It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.

somethoughts3• 2 years ago

It'll be interesting if Twitter/X does drift rightward amongst contributors and still keeps its For You feed oriented toward "engagement" and view counts, whether or not it will just end up leading to infighting between far right and moderate right views.

mrtksn2• 2 years ago

I think so, extreme ideologues like communists, islamists or any other hardcore ideologues fight among each other and in their own tribes all the time because they are actually divided quite a bit on the implementation details. Once the thing they rage against is gone, they will have to rage against each other. The anti-jewish Trump supporters already begin dropping out with disappointment.

phillipcarter• 2 years ago

It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture

My belief is that there's some very real reasons for that!

First, incendiary posts seem to get boosted by the algorithm. It's good for engagement, which keeps people online and hooked, which feeds more ads, and is good for the business. Elon and his CEO of the company know this.

Second, the more you look at the replies, the more you find people who are weirdly into Elon Musk. They'll bring him up even in a thread where he's not mentioned and the topic isn't about him. "Thank god Elon saved free speech!" or something rather. Just profoundly weird stuff that I can't help but feel is designed to stroke his ego. Again, I believe the algorithm is intentionally boosting these things. It also serves to create a cult of personality. He's not just the site owner, but he's its "savior".

Lastly, the company is clearly in trouble financially. Revenue is down substantially by all accounts, and there's a very high valuation to live up to. They want to get people to pay money, look at ads, and keep them coming back again and again for more. Being community-first and focused on people having the kind of good time they want in their communities just doesn't align with those very difficult business constraints.

timmg4• 2 years ago

It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.

Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.

enumjorge• 2 years ago

Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

The issue with Twitter and a lot of social media is that you don't often encounter opposing views that are nuanced, thoughtful and constructive, but rather hot takes, rants and memes. Even when those share your same worldview they can be tiring, but when they don't, they can drain your mental energy quickly.

Perhaps people do want to live in their own bubble, but I wouldn't say we can judge that based on Twitter just because of how toxic it can be.

matsemann5• 2 years ago

It's not that I want an echo chamber of my own beliefs. Twitter has been plenty challenging for years without an issue.

I just want to post and interact with people without getting bombarded with wishes about my death for posting that I biked to work. There is no discourse there anymore, only loads of hate.

Painting people that leave as people that enjoy echo chambers is just dishonest.

scarecrowbob3• 2 years ago

"I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward."

How would you feel about, multiple times a day, being required to defend your core beliefs that you find trivially true? Or even being constantly exposed to folks who you tangentially know presenting a constant barrage of ideas that you find stupid and mean in ways that explicitly target you and yours?

After many years of being around that (I'm a queer/non-binary, an atheist, and politically far left) I stopped enjoying it and just started blocking folks.

I still seek out contrary opinions- that is why I regularly look at HN.

However, in my daily feed of stuff like "pictures of my nieces" and "birth/death announcements from my larger community" I don't really feel like I need to be confronted by folks who consider me to be literally demonic.

And, for the record, I don't expect those same people to be constantly subjected to my own opinions.

So it doesn't feel sad for me: if you consider places like "churches" or "chambers of commerce meetings" to be "safe spaces" for particular kinds of folks, then it just seems "normal".

n2d4• 2 years ago

What they're saying is rather, "I don't want to engage in a social network that is an echo chamber of someone else's beliefs."

eweise• 2 years ago

I kind of want to engage on a platform that just shows me technical posts without being interspersed with dildo ads.

code_runner• 2 years ago

I’m torn here. I would personally use whatever was fun and interesting. Threads was immediately political and I assume bluesky is too.

It’s just a lot. Twitter will be awful. Bluesky will be a little over the top. I don’t know what’s happening in threads these days…

People want to yell into the void and don’t want to think about more than 140 characters… and there really isn’t a place for just easy going goofy fun

andrew_• 2 years ago

This is exactly my take as well. The people leaving and putting out the call for others to follow them are the same ones that lost their power when the platform changed hands and the ideologies of the people who run it changed.

derbOac• 2 years ago

Having watched the explosion of Bluesky over the last week, and being on Mastodon for years, I have a different take on it. It's sort of consistent with what you're saying but sort of not.

The problem to me is more that whenever you have a centralized platform that's associated with a single owner, it inherits all the issues of that owner, good and bad. It's inevitable. I'm not sure it's an issue with people not wanting to hear other viewpoints, it's more so people have decided they have had enough of, say, Musk, and don't want to support him. With Facebook stuff came up about that. The other stuff, about feeling like they're drowning in abusive right-wing stuff is also part of it but I think if it were just, say, like the web, they'd say "well this is the web" like people say "this is the news". Once you can point to, say, Musk, and say "he made it this way" or "I don't want to support a person like this", regardless of whether or not it's true or whatever, if enough people feel that way, they're going to want an alternative.

This won't really go away until there's a decentralized open system that's easy to use, and not associated with any given "owner". Mastodon/AP is close but things there are so closely associated with hosts that the host starts to become a dominant issue (see Threads), as does figuring out where to go, and transferability of accounts across servers.

As for "why Bluesky"? Probably because it looks like Twitter and a lot of journalists and politics people were complaining about Threads rules prohibiting things they wanted to post. Not because it's left or right wing, but because of links and political content period. I don't know enough about Threads policies but independently lots of journalists on Bluesky were saying they just couldn't post content on Threads even if it was fairly neutral, or that it wouldn't get any visibility?

Bluesky is easy to sign up for and fairly open. Once you get the journalists and news organizations on there, and a critical mass it grows.

Personally from a technical standpoint I'd like to see Nostr take off but that community currently is very heavily crypto-focused. Network effects and feedback loops are a pain.

techfeathers• 2 years ago

"I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

I really don't. I know you mean this as an insult, but like, it gives this weird reverence to social media that I don't get. I am all sorts of interested in long form media that explores striking/dangerous/novel ideas that really expand my mind and help me to see the world in a whole new way, or interviews with people who have a set of beliefs that are different from mine.

I am not interested in 140 character hot takes that just pounce at my amygdala, just like I wouldn't want my Thursday night football game to cut away to a five minute diatribe on the pros and cons of abortion access, or my video games to lecture me on free market economics.

Engaging in as social network that isn't an echo chamber of my beliefs is like being interrupted every five minutes during dinner time to be yelled at by a different evangelist. Church is on Sunday, thanks.

hresvelgr• 2 years ago

Mono-cultures are forming because as a whole, we are becoming less tolerant. Tolerance is the ultimate challenger of belief because it is gentle. No extremist is going to change their ways because people keep yelling at them to change. It'll be because they see the people they revile living perfectly fine lives and willing to accept them as they are.

"B-but they believe these morally reprehensible things!" So what? Have we not all hurt people and been the villain in someone else's life? People get lost along the way. Show them grace. We can't force people into different ways of living, but we can show them.

epistasis2• 2 years ago

The amount of antisemitism in the replies of any Jewish person on X, when the topic is the technical topics that I pay attention to, is revolting.

If that pure noise, a litany of uninteresting ad hominem attacks at best, which drown out relevant conversation, is "diversity" that's required, what is gained? If not wanting to be subjected to uninteresting insults is an "echo chamber" is that so bad?

Twitter was interesting because you could have on-topic conversations with world experts and random people. By protecting the uncivil, and even elevating it with for-purchase blue checks, people find better uses of their time.

The destruction of value in the transition of Twitter to X is something to behold. The person who bought it had no clue about the value of what he bought and what drove the value. Social networks are about the people; Twitter in particular was about the specialists, the journalists, the exchange of ideas, far more than any other social network. And that was all destroyed so that more bots can spam people and so that personal attacks can be left up.

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

I'd love a proper spectrum. But my spectrum pretty much stops when we start excusing unironic prejudice. I think "your body, my choice" was pretty much the tipping point for many people deciding to move ship.

Fortunately I do have a few other smaller hubs for a more "diverse" (in the original sense of the word) conversation, while not allowing bigotry.

dwaite• 2 years ago

But X for them is an echo chamber of opposite beliefs.

The premium account system where comments are not sorted chronologically but where paid accounts post first (on top of a poorly moderated platform) leads to drive-by toxicity, not intelligent discourse.

root_axis• 2 years ago

I find it incredibly sad

Sounds great to me, if its true. Prior to social media, "echo chamber" was the status quo, and I think everyone can agree things were a lot more peaceful during that time.

honzabe• 2 years ago

Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."
I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.

It's not that I don't want to engage. I just don't want to be submerged there all the time. I want to spend most of my time surrounded by 'my people' and only once in a while peek outside.

Let me recommend an article by Noah Smith where he argues (IMO convincingly) why he thinks that the internet works better as a fragmented thing https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm...

AtlasBarfed2• 2 years ago

Maybe the social networks promoting the most radical, outrageous, loud, and disturbing posts are the problem.

If the political alignment of those posts resonates with you, it isn't as annoying.

It's noteworthy that with AI, so far we will just get more / louder / more awful posts, rather than a potential for superior moderation and appreciation for nuance.

After all, the busted metrics that AI will be aligned to are the same old flawed ones that reward sociopathy.

tarsinge• 2 years ago

There is a difference between a social network or forum that has different beliefs but interesting discussions, and one that is solely focused on attacking the other camp.

jimnotgym• 2 years ago

I don't want to engage in a social network where if I state my views, a horde of people who disagree can get me shaddowbanned. Now I state my views to an empty room.

pfisherman• 2 years ago

Have people not always been this way? It seems like people forgotten their Emily Post —that it is generally considered a faux pas to discuss controversial topics like religion or politicd outside of intimate social settings with close friends and family.

Anyway, I don’t want an echo chamber for my beliefs. I just want to be able to discover and discuss scientific articles and watch sports highlight clips without being bombarded by a bunch of bullshit.

gethoht4• 2 years ago

It’s not an echo chamber to refuse to accept hate speech and shitty right wing media. It’s an interesting but continuous claim that if you don’t accept far right and increasingly fascist viewpoints, you live in an echo chamber. This is a lie.

personalityson• 2 years ago

Saw a post on Twitter about how Bluesky autobans for posting "there are two genders". Went over to Bluesky's subreddit to ask how they feel about it -- got banned on their subreddit too

_tom_• 2 years ago

It's still an empty place. I just moved over, and I could find NO ONE with my interests (a common hobby). There are / were thousands of people in this group on twitter. I doubt it's even one percent of even what's left on X.

Uvix3• 2 years ago

Bluesky waited too long to open up. They'd have seen a lot more takeup if they'd been available when Twitter started going downhill post-Musk. But they made a lot of their potential userbase write them off, which is going to stunt any possibility of growth.

lupire• 2 years ago

Duocultures, not monoculture.

Every shard speaks Common Tongue, the inoffensive moderate conversation that is acceptable everywhere.

Each shard also has its own local flavor, with local axioms and heresies.

gorwell2• 2 years ago

Bluesky is the blue version of Gab. You'll find that it's an ideological echo chamber and gets uninteresting fast.

The difference is that this version of Twitter isn't censoring and banning people for wrongthink. The people leaving are self selecting out of the idea gene pool, as opposed to being forced out.

Naval wrote it well, "Rigid ideologues move but the persuadable center does not. So they just move into irrelevance."

nojvek• 2 years ago

Twitter is Elon’s megaphone. His tweets are mega boosted.

And the ads. Sooooo many scammy ads.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

bluesky is reselling domains? Not sure that's still the case. Never saw anything about buying a new one when I was going thru the settings to change a handle.

That being said, the change handle to domain process is quite slick with very smooth DNS record based transfer done in a minute.

jeffgreco2• 2 years ago

They do. Since July. https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

July 2023. Like I said, don't think that's the case anymore. It's not in the process of handle changing. They simply suggest buying your own domain from any registrar now.

llm_nerd• 2 years ago

Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

Retr0id8• 2 years ago

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

both bluesky and mastodon also emit RSS feeds

jazzyjackson6• 2 years ago

a bluesky appview that intertwingled RSS feeds into my home feed would be pretty killer.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

I agree but I fear it would be used as an excuse to no longer interact with the public and turn off all reply comments by default.

archagon3• 2 years ago

Well, Mastodon is not a private business. Government agencies could post on their own instances.

jtbayly3• 2 years ago

One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above?

I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

palata9• 2 years ago

I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?

Terr_4• 2 years ago

there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department.

Their website! Now get off my lawn! :p

ianburrell3• 2 years ago

ActivityPub is something like RSS. It is based on OStatus which used Atom and other standards. But it also does multidirectional syncing.

If Bluesky did ActivityPub, that will federate Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. There are tools for posting to old social media, we will probably see tools for the new ones. Should be easier since protocols are more open.

protocolture4• 2 years ago

Realistically I think all social media should have been operating on an open standard years ago.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 2 years ago

Somehow publish to all of the above?

I would have assumed this one. What's the downside?

plaguuuuuu• 2 years ago

Internet publishing? we could create a generic document format that could be published on the net. you'd need some standard markup to define presentation. then a hypertext protocol of some kind could transmit.

tomrod• 2 years ago

Bluesky. It's fantastic.

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

I think those sorts of publishers should have a script that posts notifications to all sort of places automatically.

RSS in the large is a nightmare. My agent YOShInOn lives on the wrong side of an ADSL connection and has all its RSS fetching done by

https://superfeedr.com/

which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from MDPI that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or The Guardian but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.

rakoo2• 2 years ago

This is exactly why WebSub, formerly Pubsubhubbub, was written. Publishers can push to a relay only when something new happens, never having to be polled.

It was created more than a decade ago.

DSMan195276• 2 years ago

These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

The problem is that it's very hard to justify spending money to accomplish this when Twitter/X/Bluesky/Threads/etc. is offering the service for free.

segasaturn• 2 years ago

The fediverse very much is "the commons", at least it's as close as you can hope to get online.

Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.

throwawaymaths2• 2 years ago

But it's not because each node is still controlled by someone who can choose what's on it and who has access

andrewclunn• 2 years ago

Newspapers filled this role once, and they're privately owned. You have two choices: privately owned or government run. I'll take the private ownership route. Better than prior, now users can openly write back outside of "letters to the editor" and without paying money. People used to complain about Twitter censorship, now they complain about its ownership. One is about free expression. The other is about political tribalism.

orwin• 2 years ago

You have two choices: privately owned or government run

Or worker owned, or shared ownership (basically 1/3 capital, 1/3 workers and 1/3 local council, ratios are not usually that, it is often 60% for the capital owners, but you see the point)

mikegreenberg2• 2 years ago

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/)

pier25• 2 years ago

So in theory one could publish into the ATP network (or whatever it's called) and a bunch of ATP clients could receive it?

And Bluesky is a publisher and a client?

kccqzy5• 2 years ago

Mastodon is not a bloated sloppy mess. Have you even used it? I use it every day and it's enjoyable. It felt like 2010s Twitter. It both makes me feel good and is also educational (because I have chosen to follow accounts that provide educational value, not just empty rhetoric).

TylerE5• 2 years ago

Yes. And it was a bloated sloppy mess I ran from screaming. It SUCKED, and STILL sucks.

fragmede6• 2 years ago

Have you ever tried to stand one up?

krisoft3• 2 years ago

That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone.

When you want to reach people you go to where the people are. You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not join twitter because the police was posting there, the police post on twitter because that is where they can reach the people.

pseudalopex4• 2 years ago

Twitter is a place where they can reach some people. Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not.

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

Twitter almost literally started as a place to get updates on celebrities, designed closely to UI's seen in tickerboard updates. So the metaphor is more apt than you'd think.

asah• 2 years ago

Twitter was never a majority of Americans let alone 80-90+% share that justifies being a single outlet for a taxpayer funded agency.

roenxi• 2 years ago

The people aren't on Twitter, pretty sure every time I've checked the stats Twitter users are a relative minority. It caters to the sort of people who enjoy communication without discussion - that might be the police's target audience for their communication but it isn't most people.

I've been annoyed over the years because (not having an account) sometimes Twitter won't let me look at Tweets. Hopefully none of them contained useful info.

paxys• 2 years ago

Twitter used to be a good way to share information because the tweet link would expand into all the info you needed to see, regardless of whether you were a Twitter user or not. Today it sits behind an auth wall, and so is inaccessible to a majority of the population.

consteval5• 2 years ago

This is because the US has a history of inadequate public infrastructure. Local safety alerts and things of that nature are a public service, and there should be a system in place to perform them. There isn't, and still really isn't to this day. Sure, we have amber alerts and such but that's not really the same thing.

madeofpalk• 2 years ago

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

To be fair, that is what ActivityPub is - less simple syndication.

mulderc• 2 years ago

I thought you could subscribe to an RSS feed for basically anyone on mastodon?

nikodunk• 2 years ago

For those who find Mastodon's default client a little bloated, please check out https://phanpy.social. It is one of the most thoughtful PWAs and websites I have ever used, and made Mastodon a daily for me now. It's feels like Threads but with deeper functionality.

It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc

gfc67• 2 years ago

It will never make sense cause Claude Shannon already told us why.

When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything. And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the number of times they repeat their message. This compound the absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further.

When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free.

Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast simultaneously.

Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell broadcast capability.

shombaboor• 2 years ago

folks should just go to wholly owned websites like back in the day. on the other hand most major websites are absolutely unreadable with the ads/autoplay videos.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

What is the commons then? I think it's the internet at large, email, RSS, etc.

chaxor• 2 years ago

What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess?

It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript than Twitter, not more.

The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant, and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to twitter

Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just works'.

mschuster91• 2 years ago

What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess?

Have you tried running a server? Even a single user instance is a resource hogger.

ahnick• 2 years ago

It's federation that is the problem. Federation leads to fragmentation, which ultimately is a headwind to adoption. IMHO you need a single network that allows people to choose the "channels" that you can view/join and then people that join that channel start hosting and replicating the content. Also, great filtering controls are critical to the success of such a platform.

Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be interested though if someone has run across or is working on a system like that.

snowwrestler• 2 years ago

Your local TV channels and newspapers aren’t commons either; they’re as privately owned as Twitter or Bluesky. Yet local governments make good use of them too, and have for many decades.

Things do not need to be publicly owned or distributed to be useful to society.

tshaddox• 2 years ago

Hmm, that makes me think that maybe it would be a good idea to have non-commercial public-access television.

rakoo2• 2 years ago

The ironic bit is that conceptually Bluesky is RSS with WebSub <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub>

- PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher

- Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a central host

- App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to any step that comes after

- PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice social-oriented UI.

A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed

1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds. Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to follow, you're done. Social readers <https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that with indieweb formats.

2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them, https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a notification to the hub when something is published. Having hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact we already have something like that, it's called Planets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)>

3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair", "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to build

All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

Having seen this process of creation sustaining & decaying happen again and again, I totally get why you would feel this.

And I forgive you for applying the thinning broadly like this, casting insidious doubt widely like this.

But that's not what Bluesky is doing. Some links; first their o.g. app-lead (is that still right?),

The network should outlast the company. Imagine if the Web died when Netscape or Yahoo did! It's strange to even think that. The same should apply to social networks.

https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g

(Or see 18 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012757)

And ((new) board member) Mike Masnick & (founder) Jay Graber on protocols not platforms, 9 months ago (pre Mike on the board),

https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social/post/3kjtmw4m6...

Steve Klabnik has a post, How Bluesky Works, that talks about what Bluesky is. Yes, right now a variety of the layers of At Protocol are run by BlueSky alone. But the data can retain its integrity even if they fail, the network & data is by design open & transparent to all & transferable, and it's all based on protocols. https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work

This hypothesis that everyone else has been rug pulled & so BlueSky will too defies a ton of very hard careful work that Jay began when she very specifically worked to make sure BlueSky could be independent, to make it based on protocols.

verdverm9• 2 years ago

You can get an RSS feed for any user on Bluesky

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 | https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds

My opinion is that their ATProto is better than ActivityPub b/c account migration and global search among other things

ineedaj0b4• 2 years ago

no. i like twitter and think this is good.

dayvid• 2 years ago

Twitter was a really good mix of viewpoints and people, but it’s people so toxically politicized and right wing that a lot of the interesting accounts have left. It’s a weird thing that could’ve only existed because they weren’t focused on profit.

mhh__2• 2 years ago

The only people I've seen moving to bluesky so far in this latest batch have basically been smug lefty types and lawyers. They're free to do as they please but these are not the early adopters that make a culture good.

threeseed7• 2 years ago

There is no monopoly on what makes a culture "good".

Every community will have its own strengths and weaknesses.

Retr0id8• 2 years ago

The "early adopters" arrived almost 2 years ago ;)

someothherguyy2• 2 years ago

How could you possibly know what a million users are "basically" like?

ndarray3• 2 years ago

By looking.

- Which accounts get the most followers

- Which posts get to the top of their front page

- What is the predominant sentiment in the comments

mhh__2• 2 years ago

The only people I have seen

nerdjon• 2 years ago

Maybe this will finally be the time but every time there has been a “migration” it feels like Twitter still holds onto enough of a stronghold that most people don’t move over so you make the move but you end up back on twitter.

Particularly if you are using it as a tool to advertise your company, channel, stream, etc.

I would love for this to not be true this time. But I am not holding my breath.

cassepipe3• 2 years ago

I think the last wave was towards Mastodon but most migrants returned because it was too unfamiliar. On the contrary Bluesky seems to be Twitter but without the enshittification . I can see a future for that. The open protocol/network story being a probably small bonus.

tmvphil• 2 years ago

One thing I like about bluesky is it allows you to watch embedded videos from external media sources (e.g. youtube) without leaving the app. Seems like twitter/X was clearly opposed to the loss of control this entailed.

pjc502• 2 years ago

And it doesn't penalize links off the site.

jazzyjackson6• 2 years ago

I don't understand this critique:

I’ll also add that the reason I’m a big fan of a ActivityPub solution like Mastodon is that it’s quite inexpensive to run your own complete stack unless you’re extremely famous. Hosting a Mastodon instance is a one-step process, and you then control everything. To get the same experience with atproto, you’ll need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, and even then you still don’t control everything as of today.

When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison. I'm quite interested to find whether there will be niche relays that only index posts from certain pds (or provide a kind of community-chat discord competitor by being one server that hosts the PDSs of the community, and also provides the relay and appview for that community)

GavinAnderegg2• 2 years ago

If you want to run your own social platform, you can do so by running your own Mastodon instance. If you want to do the same with Bluesky, you simply can't at the moment. You'll either need to rely on other parts of the system that you don't control, or you'll need to control the whole system at great expense.

jazzyjackson6• 2 years ago

Aha, agreed that they are not offering anything for the use case of standalone communities. I wish they would, and I think the architecture is there for it, it's just that no one has used a relay in that way yet. I /might/ take it up myself in the next year or two, really I just want phpbb to have a second renassiance - special interest, user moderated forums like reddit but each community able to fork off to their own infrastructure if there's some schism re: moderation or otherwise.

programd• 2 years ago

You can run your own instance:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

It's a weird install with a hybrid of Docker and systemd, but basically you run a script on a low-end Ubuntu VM and point your DNS at it and you're done. Far less resource intensive then Mastodon.

I wish they released an official k8s Helm chart or something, but it's not too hard to roll your own deployment.

shadowfacts• 2 years ago

When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison.

That's the point, though. You don't need (nor, I imagine, would most people want) to mirror the entire network. If not needing to mirror the entire network makes self hosting simpler, then that is an advantage for the people interested in self hosting.

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

personally do not understand the same, but for a completely another reason.

microblogging, i.e. twitter, succeeded in the first place because people just want to post, and not worry about taking care of technical things.

in the demographics that often forget the password they once set, expecting "one-time setup" and "complete control" when they do not change default settings for most things is very out of touch with reality.

we are still living in the internet that for the most part wants someone else to take care of these things for them. but besides the ownership, there is nothing that is also setting bluesky aside for a regular folk. we ought to do better before celebrating any level of success.

sherburt3• 2 years ago

Did everyone in tech run out of new ideas in 2013 or something? There’s something so depressing about the hot new app of 2024 being a Twitter clone.

queuebert• 2 years ago

And Twitter is just a spiritual clone of .plan

beeflet5• 2 years ago

whats .plan?

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

Anything web platform has never been a new idea. Only evolutions from web technologies becoming more advanced.

Facebook is MySpace, Tumblr is live journal, reddit are forums and Discord is Skype.

It's all been done. Why create the new when you could recreate the old?

But yes; I to crave something new.

Can you think of anything new?

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

New, on a web platform?

The "ideal" of Mastodon was the first thing I regarded as new. This idea to properly own your communities and conversations and move them around and connect/remove others as you would an email address was novel.

In reality, it's nowhere near that ideal. But I still want to see if anyone over the years could make it work.

----

Much less realistically (somehow), I'm still waiting for that moment where we run a full on AAA game in the native browser. I think the tech is now at the point where it exists and is possible. Just not the incentives. But IDK if that's the "new" you were talking about.

est4• 2 years ago

a Twitter clone

Funny you mentioned it, but the original Twitter was never cloned. It's a messenger program status aggregator.

People used to have GTalk/MSN status bar set to various short, funny and insightful texts and Twitter was the place to have them collected.

tonfreed• 2 years ago

I'll never create a bluesky account because the people who use it ultimately think it's some sort of genius political point to rag on X.

Went to GopherconAU last week and one of the organizers very proudly announced that you should "skeet" with their hashtag like the word didn't have another completely inappropriate connotation. I really can't take this sort of internet circlejerk seriously when I have a mortgage to pay and a family to look after.

quectophoton2• 2 years ago

Bluesky looks promising. In my bubble it seems like a lot of artists have been moving to it after some Xitter fiasco with AI training or whatnot (idk, I don't keep up with those news).

But, this:

Radically open
I think some might be surprised to learn how open Bluesky is. It’s trivially easy to grab an export of any user’s data. It’s also a core assumption of the service that all the data (aside from out-of-protocol stuff like DMs) is completely open.

I'm still skeptical of Bluesky having "won" until the average user is completely aware of things like this. I fully expect that there will be some drama about this openness at some point in the future.

When this happens, we'll see if people go back to Twitter again (how many times has it been already?); or if they embrace this new social network where your art and posts can be scraped waaaaaay more easily than in Twitter, so they're probably more likely to be used for AI training anyway.

Until conversations about these topics happen between non-tech users, I'm mostly just watching how the situation evolves.

Freedom2• 2 years ago

The average user (non-tech oriented) doesn't really think about or care that much about openness. This is the kind of user who posts disclaimers on their Facebook wall saying that Facebook is not allowed to use their content.

ks20483• 2 years ago

Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in response to X's recent change to say they will).

As you imply, this is a bit meaningless for people who don't want their posts used for AI, because anyone can grab all data pretty easily (at least for now).

But, AI aside, this is so much better for a lively ecosystem - 3rd party apps, bots (the fun and useful kind), research, etc. A lots of things simply died when Musk decided effectively end the API program [1].

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3layuzbti6s2x

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-near... == https://archive.ph/ikPOk

BlueTemplar• 2 years ago

As a reminder, the Twitter APIpocalypse already happened in 2012, long before Musk... and some of the people now at BlueSky might have been behind it ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550625

At least, that's also why we got Mastodon...

DavideNL• 2 years ago

Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in response to X's recent change to say they will).

Yea, like how WhatsApp promised they wouldn't share data with Facebook;

A promise obviously has 0 value...

briandear3• 2 years ago

until the average user is completely aware of things like this.

The average user doesn’t care.

quectophoton2• 2 years ago

The average user doesn’t care.

The average user still gets surprised when a website "steals" (knows) their IP address and make some drama around this "leak", not realizing that any network communication makes this possible.

So that's what makes me think it's plausible that they might care that their whole account data can be exported by any internet rando.

(EDIT: All this is of course in the context of my bubble, where the non-techy users are mostly artists and streamers, because those are the ones I've noticed migrating to Bluesky. I realize you might have had a different subset of people in mind when responding to my comment.)

KaiserPro• 2 years ago

Saying bluesky has won seems a bit pre-emptive, especially as its less than 2% the size of threads.

Nemo_bis4• 2 years ago

Yes. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/b... stands though there were a few more waves since (starting with the Brazil situation): https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

water-data-dude• 2 years ago

I know a lot of artists who hate the idea of their work being used to train generative models, and I can’t blame them tbh. That being said, most of them know that they can’t prevent that from happening unless they want to stop posting their work anywhere public.

HOWEVER: there’s a big difference between posting your work publicly and having someone come along and use it to train their models against your wishes, and a platform changing its terms to say “And you’re giving us permission to use this to train our models”. They’re saying “no, you don’t have my permission to use my work and you’ll have to go against my wishes to use it this way”. It’s not a big difference in terms of outcome, but I think the principle of the thing is important to a lot of artists.

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.

A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people"

It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc.

To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules.

I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That

(1) Immediately improves my feed, but also

(2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and

(3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play

My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".

Karrot_Kream5• 2 years ago

I agree largely with what you wrote but have a small disagreement. I don't actually think the character count has that big of an effect. I've seen plenty of self-righteous posts on places like here (HN) and the LessWrong forums that just use more words to do the same thing.

I think the kind of person that's energized to comment online generally feels more strongly about the issue than most lurkers. This means that online conversations are dominated by the most passionate, most invested, and often least interested in impartiality. This post [1] comes to mind.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

You’re right that people can write hateful, divisive and othering content with many words. The trouble with the short content platforms is that you can’t do anything else.

ASalazarMX4• 2 years ago

The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance. I have a strong interest in interacting with cybersecurity professionals, so infosec.exchange was perfect for me, either browsing subscribed or local posts. Browsing all is something I do only when I'm bored, because many posts are not what I'd like to see. You can always migrate your account if you want.

https://instances.social/

That being said, BlueSky is simpler and easier because there's no real federation yet, and even if they have a "Discovery" algorithm, you get many options to control what you want to see. It's feels great, like Twitter before their 2012(ish?) IPO.

Terr_4• 2 years ago

The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance.

I was very disappointed to find out that whatever instance you choose can essentially hold your identity and content hostage.

I'd been hoping for something where my identity comes from a private key that I could take elsewhere.

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

The rational thing to do for someone who (1) thinks of themselves as a human being first and something else second is to join mastodon.social and (2) cares about visibility (why else are you on social?) is to join the biggest instance you can find.

Most notably people can only follow hashtags from accounts that are on their server so if you insist on joining some micro server please save yourself the hassle of putting hashtags on things.

JoshTriplett3• 2 years ago

The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance.

Consider using a self-hosting service, like https://togethr.party/ , to have your own instance on your own domain. Much like email, you should never be beholden to another party for your identity; your hosting service should be an invisible detail that can change without anyone interacting with you needing to notice.

I've watched several instances shut down over the years, and have never once regretted the decision to have an instance on my own domain. My social network handle is now the same as my email address, with an extra @ in front.

cobertos• 2 years ago

My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable.

The activation energy of moving ones home is very different from moving a social profile. I also find in some old, dead communities I was a part of, the most toxic people can't pull themselves away and stick around

Gormo3• 2 years ago

Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.

I think what you're saying here is not that politics are terrible on microblogging platforms, but that microblogging platforms are terrible, which is a pretty valid sentiment.

satvikpendem4• 2 years ago

Not really, microblogging is great to get quick news or life updates from people you follow. Yes, if you're trying to engage in discussion then it's not that useful but that is not its only use case.

safety1st2• 2 years ago

I was surprised to learn recently that Rousseau, who is usually seen as a radical egalitarian, hated the democratization of publishing. [1]

His reasoning was complex but a lot of it revolved around the simple fact that as you get more people publishing, the intellectual quality of the average published work goes down.

I'm not ready to roll back the printing press, but in retrospect the digital era has proven him right about this. For instance his position kind of predicts Eternal September - the easier it gets to post online, the more numbskulls you have doing it. Microblogging is the ultimate expression of this and frequently the content you find on microblogging platforms is the absolute worst hot takes and generally the most vile stuff the moderation rules will permit because shock value generates impressions. It's every idiot on earth competing to be as flagrant and base as possible.

We usually hold up free speech as a virtue in Western societies and there are a lot of good reasons for that, but I'm increasingly inclined to treat microblogging less like publishing, and more like alcohol/tobacco/gambling, like it's something people do but they know it's not good for them, they do it anyway because it's addictive and easy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8ucJ29O1kM

matrix87• 2 years ago

My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

For Mastodon, it's not just political, it's cultural

It's too out there for most people (as in, any random popular public instance you go to)

energy123• 2 years ago

Is there any structural reason that will prevent Bluesky becoming like Twitter in the future?

est4• 2 years ago

It's distributed in some degree.

Nemo_bis4• 2 years ago

Not yet. Maybe later... https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/

satvikpendem4• 2 years ago

I'm not sure Bluesky filters out angry content at all, as this is what I see when I don't follow anyone or have any followers [0]. I wish there was way more filtering than what I currently see as it makes me not want to even interact with Bluesky if that's what I see as a new user.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/XHmidRt

Kye2• 2 years ago

I don't see any of that because I've gone to the effort to Show Less on that sort of commentary in the Discover feed. None of it is in Following because I don't follow any of them.

I don't know exactly how they populate that with no following, but I can prove it's filtered by showing you this completely unfiltered view: https://firesky.tv

Have Ctrl+F4 ready to go. Good luck.

gethoht4• 2 years ago

Basically what I did is just follow some people I knew from twitter, and from that I discovered a few follow lists and block lists that I liked. Within a couple of days I had a pretty well curated and very busy feed of things I was interested in seeing and interacting with.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

It's certainly a better name, if nothing else. Names like Mastodon, Diaspora, are just terrible. One sounds lika a dinosaur, the other like an unpleasant condition of the large intestine (yes I know what diaspora means).

moomin2• 2 years ago

In my experience the people who left first were the funny and interesting ones. I left a while later because I was bored.

Turns out HN is my Colorado.

mort96• 2 years ago

To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read)

I guess you'd be a year early but I mean, the outwardly fascist candidate just won the US presidency so I'm not sure what your point is?

calf3• 2 years ago

That just sounds like Mastodon users, many who are academics, are more to the left than you are, and you are cleverly framing their culture as more "divisive", "performative", and/or "tribal" compared to your own arguments which arguably are also just as tribal and performative.

ernst_klim• 2 years ago

I would argue that people in academia or other tightly coupled bubbles where your career and thus well-being are far more reliant on how your peers evaluate you (especially in humanities where peer reviews are nearly the sole factor of success) is far more tribalist than a typical blue-collar or office environment.

https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/how-dumb-ideas-capture-smart...

z3ncyberpunk4• 2 years ago

Am academic -- the culture IS more divisive, performative, and tribal.

Kye2• 2 years ago

They recently shipped some changes to Discover to make Show Less and Show More actually work. If I understood right[0], they only collected data from them until that point.

The result isn't perfect, but I do notice it's much more in line with what I want in a timeline.

[0] I should save more links! The devs talk openly about what they're working on and the changes that end up in the app and protocol, so I have the knowledge that something changed, but not always a link to the source of that knowledge since it was just another post in the timeline.

barfingclouds• 2 years ago

I have bluesky and mastodon accounts and I’m always surprised at how people extreme people call them. I have them just as my music/photography accounts. So the people I add are doing the same stuff. My feed is just as extreme as Flickr aka zero extremeness. Just pictures of bridges and music and normal thoughts.

bsimpson3• 2 years ago

Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism. In theory, I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn. I haven't had a portfolio in years, because I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it. Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists. (And plenty of precious content that ended up on other services, like Qik, no longer does.)

If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.

FactKnower69• 2 years ago

If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities, Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort posters.

doawoo• 2 years ago

Last time I checked that’s called gatekeeping.

Neocities is a ton easier to try for “non-engineers”- it even has a discovery feed and a WYSIWYG editor…

mcpar-land• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists.

by the good grace of Meta Inc. and nothing else. Your account can get purged because:

- they decide to start purging old content

- they comply with a censorship order from the country you live in (or a country you don't live in)

- the CEO decides they don't like you (though that's really only a current issue on Twitter)

Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism.

Decentralization is the bedrock of all the _most_ pragmatic internet technologies (DNS, HTTP, Email), centralization is a more recent phenomenon driven by a dozen or so very large companies.

TylerE5• 2 years ago

This feels like an argument that stuffing cash under your mattress is better than keeping it in a bank. The number one cause of data loss - by far - is technical incompetence. 99.9% of users do not have the expertise to spin up an AWS instance and maintain it.

Retr0id8• 2 years ago

I like and use matrix (I'm indeed one of those ideological types), but even their nice webapp is janky in comparison to discord, with fewer features on paper (E2EE is huge, but the median discord user doesn't care). I use it in spite of the jank.

With bluesky on the other hand, there really isn't much jank, certainly not relative to twitter (except right now when it feels like the servers are struggling to scale fast enough...). The average bluesky user doesn't seem to be ideologically motivated (or if they are, their ideology is "I don't like elon musk"). They mostly use bluesky because it works for them, regardless of implementation details.

bsimpson3• 2 years ago

I suspect being spun out of Twitter, developed by Dan Abramov, and not owned by Mark Zuckerberg are all inputs that make Blue Sky feel like the blessed continuation of what used to be Twitter (at least for people in the hacker sphere).

Arathorn2• 2 years ago

On the Matrix side: to be clear, Element Web/Desktop isn't a nice new webapp (yet) - it's an 8 year old codebase which is improving slowly but surely (unless we get lucky and can focus on a step change). Element X however is an entirely new mobile app written in Rust + Swift UI / Jetpack Compose, and it has zero jank, and gives an idea of just how good Matrix can be: https://element.io/blog/deep-dive-into-element-x/ etc.

It's fascinating to see how well Bluesky has done with RN + Expo though, and makes me wonder what an equivalent Matrix client would feel like. Unfortunately rnmatrix.com looks to have been stalled since Annie joined Beeper/a8c.

wmf2• 2 years ago

Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people. So everyone incurs extra complexity to benefit a small minority.

I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it

This is caused by you writing custom software, not by decentralization. If you were running some off-the-shelf software like WordPress it would probably be updated to keep pace with the world so you wouldn't have to do much.

sangnoir• 2 years ago

Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people.

There is a larger group of people who are frequently harassed but don't have sufficient control to prevent harassment on Twitter, for instance the recent change in what the block button does.

With decentralization, one can self-host on their terms, or find one with like-minded people and have more stringent controls on both incoming and outgoing messages, via blocks or defederating unmoderated or otherwise disagreeable instances.

fsflover4• 2 years ago

the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people.

Are you suggesting that journalists and activists should have their own, separate social network?

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn.

But people still care about it and that minority can become expensive to fight off. We see this as we speak with games. The (IMO, frivilous) minorities got to a point last week where 2 Californians are trying to sue a 10 year old game for shutting down in 2023 (before this law they are suing under was made).

It'll probably take a few thousand to fight it off, so those two plantiffs are having the effect of maybe 100 gamers in terms of cost. For what I see as a frivilous lawsuit. Imagine one with teeth.

dang2• 2 years ago

Recent and related:

How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147430 - Nov 2024 (42 comments)

1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144340 - Nov 2024 (109 comments)

Ask HN: Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129768 - Nov 2024 (44 comments)

Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129171 - Nov 2024 (13 comments)

Visualizing 13M Bluesky users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118180 - Nov 2024 (236 comments)

Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42112432 - Nov 2024 (168 comments)

How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086596 - Nov 2024 (79 comments)

Bluesky Is Not Decentralized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994 - Oct 2024 (194 comments)

There are lots more...

rc00• 2 years ago

Is there going to be a plan for this blatant PR campaign and site manipulation? Is this not against HN's terms?

consumer4513• 2 years ago

There is a seismic shift happening, involving millions of users.

Also, this is a seemingly great underdog story. First open source app to top the App Store, a tiny scrappy team of protocol nerds takes on the most powerful people in the world...

What leads you to believe that people posting about this is not organic?

Anecdotally, I have submitted a few stories about Bluesky, and I am paid nothing.

dang2• 2 years ago

The community interest seems genuine to me. I think it's just having a moment.

INTPenis• 2 years ago

There is nothing to win. Fediverse has always been and will always remain an interesting place for sub-cultures.

givemeethekeys• 2 years ago

A quick look at the Bluesky homepage having never been there before tells me that it's just another Reddit without the r/conservative part.

volkk2• 2 years ago

that's precisely what it is

fsflover4• 2 years ago

Beware of enshittification though: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...

helpfulContrib• 2 years ago

When I can engage in conversatons with a wide variety of different viewpoints, without any of those viewpoints being repressed through some censorship mechanism, then I'll agree that the platform has 'won'.

But Bluesky is already censoring viewpoints that the collective don't want to see promoted, so its really not much better than X.

The issue is, whether or not a collective, reactive crowd, is really the ultimate form of human discourse. I happen to think not, but its sure interesting to see the dynamics of humans flowing from one echo chamber to another ..

briandear3• 2 years ago

Bluesky is a left wing echo chamber and most of the world has no idea what it is, nor why should they care.

People act like Elon is the devil while using Gmail and googling things. Lol.

jaredcwhite• 2 years ago

I will never, ever use Bluesky. ActivityPub is the present AND future of decentralized social networking on the open web. Bluesky's protocol isn't even a standard and amounts to little more than smoke and mirrors.

I'm fine with people backing the wrong horse (again), and I don't have an ounce of FOMO. It's upsetting in a general sense that people will regularly behave in a manner against their own self-interest. But when Bluesky is fully enshittified in a few years and people are wondering what in the hell just happened, the Fediverse will be here waiting to embrace them with open arms.

MiguelX4132• 2 years ago

I'm still not gonna use anything besides the Fediverse.

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

Currently people can set up their own PDSs, which will host both their identity’s signing keys and their content on Bluesky. Setting this up requires a fair amount of server-level knowledge, but it’s relatively cheap (maybe $15/month USD) and lets people control their own data

Man, really? Domains tend to be around that much for a year.

I guess it's cheap if you're doing this for marketing purposes, but given that this was marketed towards "developers", I thought there'd be more homespun method to get this up.

But aside from that, I don't quite understand the counterargument of Bluesky not being federated/decentralized for custom domains outside of "Bluesky handles DM 's" (to paraphrase). I'm sure most users will more or less choose the centralized approach of Bluesky handling everything, but the fact that you can decentralize off is very valuable (even if it's a different service than ActivityPub)

The whole Twitter mess has taught me not to attach myself too closely with these things anymore. I hung on far too long to Twitter while it made me feel terrible. My goal going forward is to post more to my own site and aggregate to any social channel I currently care about.

indeed. Don't put your eggs all in someone else's basket. If you're selling, always try to get people on an email list (the only popular standard of federation as of now) so when that basket is taken that your devout followers can keep in touch. Ideally this decentralization of Bluesky (if you take the time/money to set it up) should let you take most of your ball home, but it may not be as easy to just "move it somewhere else". Mastodon's ideals vs. reality certainly show this.

eBombzor• 2 years ago

Why is this site so unbearably political now? Some of these takes are almost as bad as the stuff you find on the front page of Reddit...

kzrdude2• 2 years ago

It's a hot topic now because of the presidential election?

archagon3• 2 years ago

Because, politically speaking, things are very far from normal right now.

ineedaj0b4• 2 years ago

a return to normal perhaps, majority willed.

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

You ever go through the Reddit blackout of 2015 or the API scandal of 2022? It's a common phenomenon. You move to sites and the people who are the most engaged will be talking about the reason they moved and their dissatisfaction.

It'll calm down in a month. Maybe. The current atmosphere isn't going away in a month like the API protests.

chucke1992• 2 years ago

I see BlueSky getting some traction regarding some specialized discussions (akin Discord?), but Twitter will continue to be the public space to go.

tolerance• 2 years ago

What I want to know is how did people come to believe that microblogging is a social necessity. How have we allowed for what’s perhaps the most impoverished form of human expression to become a gathering place for ourselves and our institutions.

ndarray3• 2 years ago

It forces the blogger to get to the point. Even most blog posts shared on HN could have been a tweet or two.

beeflet5• 2 years ago

I've got this idea for a toy social media network that costs ~$1 per byte to post. No advertisements. It would be like an experiment in how dense people could make posts. If you wanted to post an animation, you would post a javascript file like dwitter.net

Instead of having "upvotes" or "reactions", this function would be the same as replying a single char or two. If multiple people post the same thing (like "" ":)" "L"), it gets collated and boosted as a single message.

If you want to flex, you can drop $10,000 to post a 10kiB picture of your dog. Or spend $1000 to write an overly long post. But I imagine long posts would be seen as bougie.

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

People don't like reading and pretty much all social media responded to that. At least Twitter was like that from the start.

rascul• 2 years ago

Twitter won because that's where the people I follow are. If/when they move elsewhere, wherever they move to will have won.

that_guy_iain• 2 years ago

I think Bluesky has won the battle to become the replacement for Twitter. A lot of the attempts were all trying some weird gimmick like posting voice notes and stuff. Bluesky has the whole federation stuff without actually having it, which is ok, but for the rest of it. They're clearly just copying features over from Twitter and adding in some of the most requested features for Twitter.

This makes me super happy I was on that train early and got the "iain.bsky.social" handle.

JeremyNT• 2 years ago

Bluesky has made a lot of smart choices to both support openness while also retaining the benefits of a monolithic single instance. In reality this makes it easier to use than say Mastodon.

So if you take everybody at their word and assume the money doesn't run out, this is sort of the opposite approach to federation. Build out a solid main instance and get federation working "for real" later.

But has it won? I guess that remains to be seen. It entirely depends on the users who are willing to move there from x.

singpolyma3• 2 years ago

The federation is working for real now. People are using it

camwhite• 2 years ago

the article says:

"if you want to look up a DID:PLC, you need to query the Bluesky servers. This is important because every user is identified by a DID:PLC, and all interactions need to reference them."

which is not strictly true.

almost every user is identified by a DID:PLC but DID:WEB is also supported. DID:WEB is not mentioned in the article at all

I think this is important because it means that users can opt into being their own source of truth for their "identity" in the ATPROTO system

EmersonL2• 2 years ago

I loved Twitter. It was this magic place where I could connect with both friends and legends in my field (programmers). That’s not what it is anymore and it’s impossible to ignore how political it’s become.

Bluesky feels like Twitter used to and it’s shockingly refreshing to hear about industry news and friendly updates rather than some “pick-up artist” explaining how women are too privileged these days.

llm_trw3• 2 years ago

The first post when I opened it after reading yours:

The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying “unqualified DEI hires” are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test.

This is the opposite of what I want in any app I open. It's time we stop chasing engagement for sites and start filtering for content. I want sites that don't promise to be the place to do everything for everyone but one's which I can judge on their censorship to know if I want to join.

EmersonL2• 2 years ago

Bummer, sorry to hear this!

archagon3• 2 years ago

Well, Threads does that[1]. So it seems to mostly be full of menial banter, if that's up your alley.

[1] https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-ou...

horns4lyfe• 2 years ago

It was also a magical place that gave the CIA carte Blanche to monitor Americans and spread propaganda, and was happy to censor in behalf of the federal government. that’s my beef with the folksy view of old Twitter

hollerith2• 2 years ago

Also, its "format" probably contributed significantly to political polarization: specifically, restricting tweets to 140 characters made it tedious for a writer to provide and a reader to obtain a detailed explanation of anything, but made it easier for a writer to join a mob with a simple message.

verzali• 2 years ago

But that hasn't changed. If anything it's going to be far worse. The owner of Twitter is literally going to be part of the Federal government. It seems naive to think he won't manipulate or censor it on behalf of the government or his own interests.

IAmGraydon• 2 years ago

I loved Twitter. It was this magic place where I could connect with both friends and legends in my field (programmers). That’s not what it is anymore and it’s impossible to ignore how political it’s become.

It is a program. What has become political is society. Bluesky and Twitter are just the two sides of the fracture manifesting as online discussion spaces. Bluesky users are just as polarized as Twitter users, but perhaps more in line with what you’re comfortable with reading.

z3ncyberpunk4• 2 years ago

Bluesky is overwhelmingly the same hyper-political cult spam, just painted blue. To say it isn't political is just blatantly ignorant.

GMoromisato2• 2 years ago

I remember Quora circa 2016 fondly. It had a high number of interesting people writing deep insights into their area of expertise. And then, of course, since they are a venture-backed startup, they tried to grow, and it all went sideways.

I think a small, somewhat homogeneous community is very attractive. You get a high ratio of interesting posts and very little toxic behavior.

The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. Technology won't solve this problem (because it is not a technology problem). Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.

Maybe the balkanization of social media is the best we can hope for.

jltsiren• 2 years ago

I think the fundamental issue is running a social network as a for-profit business. Every business model people have tried so far has ruined the platform for the people who originally found it valuable.

Online services do scale, which is the root of the problem. It's more profitable to focus on a large number users who get a little value from the platform than on those who find it particularly valuable. No matter whether your revenue comes from ads or subscription fees, you want more users, more impressions, and more activity. Which turns your focus away from whatever the early adopters did when there was only a little activity.

Influencers are a convenient red flag. Once they find a platform attractive, it's probably no longer good for activities not centered around them.

prisenco2• 2 years ago

We don't actually want online communities to get too big, from a users' perspective. After a certain size, they become difficult to maintain any sense of responsibility to the established culture, become targets for coordinated manipulation or misuse and end up requiring constant moderation just to be usable.

But taking venture capital means you can never restrict growth, even if in the end it kills your service.

I'd love to see a Reddit that caps its communities to a thousands or even hundreds. Once that cap is hit, either form a new community or join a waiting list. But it's clear that a hundred passionate users often produces a much better discussion than millions.

fsflover4• 2 years ago

The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. ... Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.

Every problem you mentioned is solved by Mastodon. Independent instances can and should stay relatively small to allow good and independent moderation, while the whole network can grow a lot without being homogeneous.

GMoromisato2• 2 years ago

Maybe you're right--we'll see.

How big do you think a Mastodon instance can get before it's too big? Right now the largest instance is maybe 1 million users. Let's say that's a good size. To get 3 billion people on it (Facebook's scale) we'd need 3,000 different instances, right?

Except, people won't evenly distribute. Instead, we'll have a power law distribution. The largest instance will be maybe 500 million users, the next largest will be 200 million, and so on. That means that most Mastodon users will be in Twitter-sized instances, and you'll either have to spend a ton of money on moderation (except, I don't know who pays) or you'll end up with the usual toxic anarchy.

Funes-• 2 years ago

The author seems to imply that "winning" here correlates with a measure of posting frequency:

If Bluesky comes out as a “winner” and more posting happens there, I think I’m generally fine with that. At least for now.

If that's what the match between microblogging services is about, I wager Bluesky has no chance whatsoever to come out the winner. It sounds like wishful thinking to me. Mere delusion.

leoc• 2 years ago

Relevant information about the links between the AT Protocol and IPFS: https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3l7vjsvufwc2g .

racl101• 2 years ago

I'd never heard of this Bluesky until this post election reaction. I'd heard of Mastodon but not Bluesky.

nikolay• 2 years ago

Or more like... Ruby has lost!

asdfman123• 2 years ago

I loved Twitter so much but now I find it literally unbearable. It's not the politics, everyone is aggressively mean and it's just too much.

Bluesky is a breath of fresh air.

g8oz• 2 years ago

I encourage people to give Mastodon a fair go. Don't be scared off by the negative stories. It can definitely be a positive experience.

spike021• 2 years ago

As with a lot of things these days, the places you congregate are what you make of it.

Putting aside the issues with who owns twitter and some of their recent policy shifts about content, I still have relatively sanitized feeds where I mostly only see friends' content. I'm still making new friends from Japan on it through our shared hobbies. Most of the sports news I follow is still there.

Nothing materially has changed about how I use the platform.

Bluesky is still pretty empty. Maybe some "nodes" of it are getting busier as people trickle out of twitter but I'm not sure it matters much until theres more saturation of many more things.

dmead• 2 years ago

Can someone explain why Twitter was good? I have an account and I posted like twice. The UI is weird, takes the entire screen to show a thread and it's difficult to follow a conversation.

I get the sense that it's just for trying to be witty. The replies are hard to follow for a reason. They aren't the point. It's really a series of unrelated posts you have to keep reading to follow any kind of "zeitgeist". It's like they thought of a good user interface for conversations and did the opposite of that.

czhu12• 2 years ago

As a counter point to the comments that say blue sky doesn’t have as much political content. I just opened the app for maybe the third time and did a cursory sample and 11/20 were political, 4/20 we’re about how bluesky has no political content, and maybe 5 were totally unpolitical.

A few screens grabs for proof: https://imgur.com/a/ra8P81G

Please for the love of god someone make a social network that has okay discovery features without political content.

I follow 3 people who post about ML papers. Not sure why blue sky shows me posts from Don Lemon and someone called @CallToActivism

tiffanyh• 2 years ago

For all the talk about Bluesky adoption and use here on HN, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Bluesky thread posted here on HN.

Very odd.

paulvnickerson• 2 years ago

Can somebody please explain to me why anybody would want to leave X for Bluesky other than the fact that Elon Musk undid the previous regime's censorship efforts (which almost always targeted a particular political viewpoint) and himself makes pro-Trump posts? This recent "mass exodus" seems more like people just upset at the outcome of the US election.

beanjuiceII• 2 years ago

no good reason to leave X, just people acting out (current thing ppl)...and they have to either keep reminding us, or keep coming back trying to get ppl to follow them...unsuccessfully no one really cares.

also advertisers like Disney,IBM, comcast, warner bros, discovery, lions gate etc are all coming back to advertising on X now

ryyr• 2 years ago

if U want Out , youneed to Quit cold turkey , replacing it does Nothing at all inthe end

bastloing2• 2 years ago

X is paying lots now to content creators. And it seems their advertisers are coming back. Strange how that works.

johneth• 2 years ago

X is paying lots now to content creators

Sure, but most of that seems to be to engagement farmers who provide little to no value to actual humans.

And it seems their advertisers are coming back.

Anything to back up this claim?

bastloing2• 2 years ago

https://www.adweek.com/media/advertisers-returning-to-x/

Comcast, Disney, and IBM Are Among Advertisers Returning to X After Ad Freeze

andreygrehov4• 2 years ago

This is the third Bluesky submission in the past week or so. My previous comments were heavily downvoted, so I don’t expect it will be any different this time.

Many people are comparing X and Bluesky, but I think this is a mistake. The two platforms shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. These are two drastically different platforms. X is a real-time news app, currently holding the #1 spot in the News category on the App Store (e.g., The New York Times is #8). Bluesky, on the other hand, is a social network and the #1 app in the Social Networking category. These are fundamentally different categories, so let’s stop treating them as rivals - they’re solving different problems for different audiences.

hollerith2• 2 years ago

Which app store?

Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category?

If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation?

andreygrehov4• 2 years ago

Which app store?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)

Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category?

No. Each application is in their own category.

If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation?

I did not assume anything. I use X as a news app, the CEO of X has stated it's a news app, and its category in the iOS App Store is News. There are no assumptions here.

johnnyanmac35• 2 years ago

It doesn't matter how much Musk pays, trying to sell to to the social concious that twitter is a "news app" is a fool's errand.

That said, I do agree that Twitter is a horrible social networking platform. Not even in a snarky way.

- I could never follow conversations on whatever the hell response system it sets up.

- It's focused on short form comments but tons of people use it as a blogging platform (including its new owner).

- The algorithms and filtering are just horrid. It is so bizarre how I can be logged off and not even see user feeds in any meaningful order (ignoring that it filters out NSFW stuff).

- They recently made worse with blocking changes. a social networking tool with bad user filering is failing its most basic task. meanwhile they also recently decided to privatized what people liked, so it's all sorts of backwards in its design.

But despite all that, Bluesky as a "social network" platform solves #3. For now. Wonderful,I can see tweets in reverse chronological order without being logged in (and for now, the curation is... fine). But people still want imageboards with small character limits so I'll just continue to yell at a (literal, not digital) cloud.

andreygrehov4• 2 years ago

Why are you trying to use it as a social networking tool?

rsynnott3• 2 years ago

Twitter is also present way down the list in the social networking category. The ‘news’ category is a much smaller pond in which it can be a big fish, but it is in both.

andreygrehov4• 2 years ago

I just scrolled through the first 200 apps in the social networking category. There is no X in there. Can you share a screenshot?

danieltanfh95• 2 years ago

Most of the Vitriole is still contained in twitter/x, bluesky will soon have the same problem and I expect it to be worse/require more active user maintenance due to the decentralised aspect of trying to moderate speech.

Bluesky should actively increase the difficulty of onboarding people onto the platform to weed out or reduce the population. Vitriole need a critical mass before it overtakes the entire discussion.

verdverm9• 2 years ago

Bluesky has pluggable moderation and users can subscribe to multiple labellers. What they offer with ATProto is competition in moderation, which is not something we've had in a social media app before

https://github.com/bluesky-social/ozone/

zoom6628• 2 years ago

I agree with authors take of writing on your own blog and then posting to network(s) for engagement. If your crowd moves its social platform then you move too. Platform independence and you choose what to "push" just like you choose what to share during IRL conversations. Platforms that own the data are farming the users.

FWIW I just exited from twitter - no value.

est4• 2 years ago

My only problem with ActivityPub or atproto is that they were not static hostable.

For readonly nodes they should be. Otherwise we could see tons of adoptions by bloggers, with some simple Github/Cloudflare Pages setup.

Nemo_bis4• 2 years ago

You can already have an ActivityPub server with your static website generator, there are a few examples (one is based on Hugo). https://maho.dev/2024/02/a-guide-to-implementing-activitypub... https://fedipage.com/

Obviously they don't implement every part of the protocol nor every feature Mastodon has.

Uptrenda• 2 years ago

Imagine putting all that effort into 'decentralization' and then building literally, the most Orwellian, cucked version of the Internet possible. See the thing with free speech is that a lot of views that might be concerned 'offensive' are in fact defined by society at that point in time. It was once considered offensive to state basic facts about astronomy to the church. It's been that way throughout history that one person's 'offensive' is another's truth. Sometimes objective truth. But usually always an ever-changing target.

Now lets say for the sake of argument that a person's speech is just trolling hateful shit. Contributing literally nothing. I argue that quite often you even want to allow this kind of speech because when almost always when you have 'content moderation' it becomes over-moderation. It's a 'slippery slope' where people are unable to keep their own biases out of moderation. Which brings me back to Bluesky. A deranged, leftist hellscape, designed to enforce the largest possible book of unwritten woke social regulations across the site. Literally stacking the deck against Wrong Think. Or an orwellian nightmare. This is what happens to the internet when you let fucktards moderate it.

Edit: ty for the downvote soyboy. On downvote sites like this if someone doesn't like your post they downvote it and it becomes a popularity competition even if you're right (which is what you're signalling is a good idea btw.) Bluesky is exactly the same. As is reddit. As is every top 100 website at the moment.

ineedaj0b4• 2 years ago

Twitter/X is great. I like it quite a lot. Follow people you like and keep that number under 100. Or if you just started, under 25 and add people slowly. Unfollow people quickly if they annoy you! Or mute them if you still like them but they annoy you temporarily.

There's two feeds: for you (the algo) and following. following is the traditional only people you know feed.

If you're having trouble with the people on X you might need to reconsider yourself. Why are you not open to many viewpoints? Diversity of thought and people should be welcome and if you hope to change minds, you do need to be able to interact with those people to do so.

I did theater when I was younger, and I think a lot of my 'open' friends weren't open per-say they were just weird and like being in the weird group more than being truly open.

EasyMark• 2 years ago

I can handle other view points, what I won't put up with is disinformation, straight up lies, and racism/sexism. They immediately go in the bin. Unfortunately that's simply not possible in the firehose feed on X since the trash is promoted to the top and I would guess that 90% of blue checks are bots either from American PACs or Russian/CCP/Iran/N. Korea.

Fomite• 2 years ago

This. I used to have two very ruthlessly curated accounts, and at the moment, trying to keep them like that is a lost cause.

z3ncyberpunk4• 2 years ago

Well then don't get on Bluesky either, which is teeming with disinformation, straight up lies, and racism/sexism.

Herbstluft• 2 years ago

Not too long ago I would have agreed with you. That was, for a long time a decent way to enjoy Twitter, even when people were already long claiming it was an unpleasant place.

But for the current situation you are just misrepresenting the problem.

Aggressively maintaining a decent follow list no longer helps.

And "other viewpoints" are not the problem. Every somewhat popular tweet has automated replies full of porn bots and clearly automated answers that say basically nothing or just try to provoke or advertise.

"Following" has become infuriatingly useless too because it algorithmically sorts in nonsensical ways.

The result: many tweets I would have liked to see get completely buried while others get shown to me over and over as I visit the site.

I'm so incredibly tired of algorithmic timelines.

It used to be a good tool on interesting updates on hobbies I enjoy. Now it just wants to waste my time, and I'm just not interested in screaming matches about daily politics.

That includes echo chambers too so it is not about differing opinions even, I don't need people from "my side" telling me again and again what the "enemy" is doing wrong and how I am supposed get angry at that.

ineedaj0b4• 2 years ago

i'll note that everyone, even the guys i like and never post about politics are posting politics. interesting times.

i will probably work through my physical book backlog in the meantime.

other things: i use the web app exclusively. the bots have been pushed to the bottom of all replies or hidden. the following feed is unaltered and chrono (annoyingly so, some posters post A LOT). and i know even hovering on things i dislike for too long will show me more of that. i get good good content from non american friends so i have a hunch this is a unique american thing rn

mattmcknight2• 2 years ago

Aggressively maintaining a decent follow list no longer helps.
I'm so incredibly tired of algorithmic timelines.

Then why not just use your following lists? I have a main list of people I follow, mostly people I know, then a bunch of topical lists for various topics, from silly stuff to NLP.

pjbster• 2 years ago

Mmm. Bluesky is the tits, for sure, but Trump has unfinished business. This is from 2020:

https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trump-and-section-230-what-know

We can assume that Twitter was a vocal opponent to the repeal at the time and that they have now become somewhat more in favour if it means knocking out their competition whilst they enjoy special protection.

All it would take is some catalytic content to kick things off and a compliant state judiciary to get the ball rolling.

Bluesky's Terms Of Service explicitly state that they are not liable for the impacts of their user's content. They say they reserve the right to delete content or accounts at any time at their discretion. And then there's this:

Indemnity: Summary: If someone brings a legal claim against us based on your actions on Bluesky Social, you are responsible for our defense in, and the consequences of, that claim.

It all looks bulletproof on the surface but I just don't know if it will survive under Trump/Musk.

cristaloleg• 2 years ago

Shameless plug: shorter profile links https://blskyl.ink/

sebazzz• 2 years ago

I still don’t understand why jack (founder) is also investor in Elons X. I wonder what the endgame is there.

bardan• 2 years ago

It seems very cozy, although filled with people pushing their commercial projects. If people are projecting Bluesky's future on its current cozy state they are fools. The only way to remain cozy is to remain small.

waihtis• 2 years ago

If by "won" you mean the reality-dissociated left have found a new echo chamber then yes.

If you are a normal person and made the right conclusion that Trump / Elon are byproducts of forcefed radical leftist policies you'd be better to steer clear from this platform. X is lightweight compared to what Bluesky is about to become.

portaouflop• 2 years ago

Zero interest to invest in another proprietary walled garden social media site.

I’ll just put stuff on my personal website.

mgaunard• 2 years ago

I never understood why Twitter ever was a thing.

defrost3• 2 years ago

You might ask the same of Harlem, Jazz, and the Cotton Club: https://press.hulu.com/shows/black-twitter-a-peoples-history...

jeswin• 2 years ago

Bluesky's biggest asset is the technical leadership team. Using Paul Frazee's (and Daniel Holmgren's - though I never actively used IPFS) work is like living in the far out future.

Is it still too early? Time will tell.

d_theorist• 2 years ago

As far as I can tell, the main reason people give for moving off X is that “there’s more hate speech/misinformation/disinformation since Elon took over because he got rid of a lot of trust and safety controls”

So, how does moving to a platform with the explicit aim of being decentralised solve this? Even Elon Twitter has more oversight than a decentralised platform with zero control.

pornel• 2 years ago

I'm concerned that Bluesky has taken money from VCs, including Blockchain Capital. The site is still in the honeymoon phase, but they will have to pay 10x of that money back.

This is Twitter all over again, including risk of a hostile takeover. I don't think they're stupid enough to just let the allegedly-decentralized protocol to take away their control when billions are at stake. They will keep users captive if they have to.

majgr2• 2 years ago

EU should simply buy it.

TheAdamist• 2 years ago

Nope. But i wish them well.

If i read some interesting article that turns out to just be a reblogging of an interesting post on a service, the original embedded article is inevitably from xitter, which if i want to read more generally i can't. Either technical or personal issues usually prevent me from being able to read the original source and additional related tweets.

nopelynopington• 2 years ago

If November taught us anything it's that instead of looking for an x alternative and creating increasingly silo'd echo chambers on the internet, we should instead be trying to disconnect ourselves from social media.

The golden age of social is over and it's just a horror show now. Look what it did.

gethoht4• 2 years ago

Bluesky definitely has a "this is what twitter used to be vibe" but it's so much more than that. With follow lists and block lists it's really easy to get up to speed and curate your feed. It's also very noticeably less algorithm driven.

silexia• 2 years ago

Unpopular opinion: X is the best social network now because of Community Notes that tell you after the fact if a post you liked was misinformation and often warns you in real time as well. You can also have long form posts on there now. Reali life breaking news is there first.

Maybe Bluesky has "won"

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